Jürgen Bajorath received a diploma and PhD in biochemistry (1988) from the Free University in West-Berlin. He was a postdoctoral Fellow with Arnie Hagler, Biosym Technol./Agouron Inst., in San Diego where he began to work on computational methods for bioinformatics and drug design.
From 1990-2004, Jürgen held positions at the Bristol-Myers Squibb Pharmaceutical Research Institute, New Chemical Entities, and the University of Washington in Seattle. During this time, his work increasingly focused on bio- and cheminformatics.
In 2004, Jürgen was appointed Professor and Chair of the newly formed Department of Life Science Informatics at the University of Bonn. He also continues to be an Affiliate Professor in the Department of Biological Structure at the University of Washington.
Research of Jürgen’s group currently encompasses the development of computational methods for medicinal chemistry and drug discovery and machine learning in chemistry.
From 2008-2020, Jürgen served as the computational editor of the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry. In 2021, he was appointed editor-in-chief of the new journal Artificial Intelligence in the Life Sciences launched by Elsevier.
Recent honors include the 2015 Herman Skolnik Award and the 2018 National Award for Computers in Chemical and Pharmaceutical Research of the American Chemical Society.
In 2021, the German Research Foundation approved a new Core Area Program for ‘Molecular Machine Learning in Chemistry’ that was conceptualized by Frank Glorius (University of Münster), Karsten Reuter (Max-Planck Institute Berlin), and Jürgen.