The Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry is proud to announce the recent promotion of two of our faculty members! The vision of our department is to promote student success through excellence in chemistry. To achieve this, we continually strive to meet goals in three areas: Research–by enhancing and expanding the department’s research capacity, Curriculum–by delivering an integrated educational experience that is innovative, effective, and relevant, and Culture–by working in a department that embraces a team spirit of cooperation and respect for all. These team members truly embody this vision and we congratulate them on their well-deserved advancements!
Dr. Rajesh Nagarajan
Dr. Rajesh Nagarajan has been promoted to full Professor at Boise State University. He first started his journey in Chemistry in Chennai, India where he earned his Bachelor of Science degree from Madras Christian College and his Master of Science in Chemistry from the Indian Institute of Technology. He went on to earn his Ph.D. from Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut and did his Post-Doc research at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.
Dr. Nagarajan joined Boise State University as an Assistant Professor in 2010 and was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2017. Prior to that, he was an Assistant Professor of Chemistry at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York.
Dr. Nagarajan has made many valuable contributions to the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry that led to his advancement to Professor. Since obtaining tenure, he has published 9 papers with Boise State students as co-authors in high impact journals such as Chemical Communications, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, ACS Chemical Biology, etc. In the past 4 years, he has been a PI or Co-PI on multiple grants, with awards exceeding $2 million, from the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health.
Since 2017, Dr. Nagarajan has been a research mentor to more than 40 students, including Ph.D., Masters, undergraduate, and high school students. Additionally, the NSF grant awarded in 2019 also helped train three high school chemistry/biology teachers. Two of his colleagues, Dr. Lisa Warner and Dr. Eric Brown are Co-PIs on his group’s research grants; the NSF and the NIH-R15 grants, respectively. He has brought several seminar speakers, including National Academy members, to the Biomolecular Science graduate program and played the role of informal ambassador to promote our graduate programs at scientific conferences and meetings.
When asked if there was anyone he would like to acknowledge as part of this accomplishment, Dr. Nagarajan expressed, “Our research program was built from scratch at Boise State University. I am incredibly grateful to the research students who worked in my lab and my colleagues without whom these achievements would have been a distant dream.”
Dr. Lisa Warner
Dr. Lisa Warner was also promoted within the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry. She was awarded tenure and moved up to the position of Associate Professor. Dr. Warner earned her Bachelor of Science degree in Chemistry right here at Boise State and went on to perform her Doctoral research and get her Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the University of Colorado at Boulder. She was a European Molecular Biology Organization Postdoctoral Fellow at Helmholtz Zentrum München and the Technical University of Munich, where she served as a lecturer and instructor on various applications of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy. Afterwards, she was a Postdoc Associate with the National Renewable Resource Laboratory in Golden, Colorado.
In 2015, she returned to Boise State University as an Assistant Research Professor in the Biomolecular Research Center and has been an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry since 2018. Over the course of her career, she has been awarded almost $5 million in grant funding, authored or co-authored many publications, and served as a research mentor to dozens of students from undergraduate to Ph.D. She has served on several committees here at Boise State University, including as chair of the Chemistry MS Graduate Committee.
Dr. Warner’s promotion was the result of excellence in research, teaching and service. In her time here at Boise State, she has successfully competed for National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health grants, managed biophysical characterization equipment and built a protein expression and purification facility. She has engaged and participated in innovative, interdisciplinary research from structural biology to metabolomics, and has continually pursued excellence in academic teaching by using evidence-based instructional practice and intentional pedagogy. She has spent her career here working to make the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, the College of Arts and Sciences, and Boise State University a better place.
Dr. Warner was asked if there was anyone she would like to recognize for helping her through all of her significant achievements. Her response was, “I would like to thank everyone in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, COAS, the Biomolecular Research Center and the COBRE in Matrix Biology, the ASSERT program in IFITS, my collaborators, and friends and family for their support.”
Congratulations to both of these remarkable faculty members!