Craig Thomas

Craig Thomas received his B.S. from the University of Indianapolis in 1995 and his Ph.D. from Syracuse University in 2000. He then completed postdoctoral work in the laboratories of Sidney Hecht, where he earned a fellowship through the American Cancer Society. In 2003, Thomas joined NIH as director of the chemical biology core at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases. In 2007, he moved to the NIH Chemical Genomics Center, which was supported by the National Human Genome Research Institute. (The center now is supported by NCATS and called the NCATS Chemical Genomics Center.) Currently, he serves as the leader of chemistry technologies experts at NCATS. He is an adjunct member of the National Cancer Institute’s Chemical Biology Laboratory and an adjunct associate professor at the Georgetown University School of Medicine and the Temple University School of Medicine. Thomas is an editor of Current Protocols in Chemical Biology and a member of the SciFinder (Chemical Abstracts Service) advisory board. He has published more than 100 peer-reviewed manuscripts, is an inventor on more than 15 patents and has given numerous invited lectures.

Research Topics

Thomas uses high-throughput technologies to make novel discoveries at the interface of chemistry and biology. His interests include the production of novel screening libraries, the development of biologically active small molecules, the association of phenotype to pharmacology, the phenotypic screening of mechanistically annotated small molecule libraries, the development of novel drug combinations, and the progression of agents into advanced preclinical and clinical studies.