Mills, Peterson honored with Woster award

When the Zucker Institute for Innovation Commercialization (ZI) created a new award in honor of the late Patrick Woster, it felt pretty natural to make it about mentorship.

It probably also felt pretty natural for the inaugural winners of the Patrick M. Woster Guiding Light Award to be Yuri Peterson and Catherine Mills, who were recently presented with the honor.

Both were intimately connected with the late Medicinal Chemistry Hall of Fame member, who served as SmartState Endowed Chair in Drug Discovery and chair of the Department of Drug Discovery and Biomedical Sciences (DDBS) at the MUSC College of Pharmacy.

Peterson, associate professor of drug discovery and biomedical sciences, followed in Woster’s footsteps and is now serving as interim co-chair of DDBS. Catherine Mills, a clinical chemistry fellow at MUSC, earned her Ph.D. with Woster as faculty advisor before continuing to work with him as a postdoctoral researcher.

They are the first recipients of the Woster Guiding Light Award, which was created this year. Nathan Dolloff, Hollings Cancer Center researcher and chief technology officer for ZI, explained the thought behind the award in a post this week:

"Many of you worked with Pat, and I had the privilege to do that for 10 years. This award is meant for a mentor or a mentor/mentee pair because, if you knew Pat, you knew one of the things about him was his lab was always full of students and trainees. They loved him. He really poured himself into his trainees and really embodied that mentor spirit.

"So we wanted to do something in his honor and to carry his legacy forward. Pat was a great mentor, great medicinal chemist, a great scientist, and a really good person. Those of you who knew him, loved him. He’s deeply missed."

Peterson’s research focus is in applied pharmacologic sciences using in vitro, cell based, and in silico approaches to quantitate protein and small molecule functionality to bridge between chemical biology and pathobiology. As a fellow, Mills is refining her training in clinical chemistry and laboratory medicine to develop her passion for clinical toxicology, pharmacology, and pharmaceutics.

“Catherine Mills and Yuri Peterson are ideal recipients for this inaugural award in honor of Pat Woster,” said Philip Hall, dean of MUSC College of Pharmacy. “They were so close to him, professionally and personally, that he would no doubt be pleased. Also, they epitomize the kind of relationship so dear to him.”

The Zucker Institute for Innovation Commercialization, a component of MUSC’s Office of Innovation, is responsible for evaluating all intellectual assets the enterprise owns and generates, cultivating value and forging industry and other relationships resulting in products and services that provide real-life solutions to the world’s medical needs.