Mark E. Welker Biographical Sketch

Mark E. Welker was born in Greensboro, North Carolina. He attended public schools in Guilford County then went on to obtain a Bachelor of Science Degree in Chemistry with Highest Honors from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1981. He received a Ph.D. degree in Chemistry from Florida State University in 1985 and was then a NIH Postdoctoral Fellow in Chemistry at the University of California at Berkeley from 1985-86. In January of 1987, he accepted a faculty position at Wake Forest University. He is now in his 26th year as a faculty member at Wake Forest University and currently holds one of about a dozen partially endowed chairs named after past University presidents. His formal academic job title is William L. Poteat Professor of Chemistry. He also holds joint academic appointments in the Departments of Biochemistry, Cancer Biology, and the Comprehensive Cancer Center at Wake Forest University School of Medicine.

He initially became interested in Grants Administration and Research Administration through serving as chair of Wake Forest University’s Research Advisory Council from 1997-2001 and from 2002-2003. During parts of 2001, 2002, and 2005 he worked as a rotating Program Officer in the Division of Chemistry at the National Science Foundation. From 2003-2012, he served as the senior research administrator for the Reynolda campus of Wake Forest University and held the formal administrative job titles of Associate Provost for Research , Associate Provost for Research and Faculty Affairs, Vice Provost, and Interim Provost. At the North Carolina state level, he has served as a member of the NC Board of Science and Technology since 2002. He typically completes 20-30 manuscript, proposal, book and tenure reviews each year and has served as a reviewer for 17 different journals, 11 different federal, state, and private granting agencies and foundations and six different publishing houses.

He has been the principal investigator (PI) on over 40 different externally funded proposals on research and education topics and has been a co-PI on many additional equipment and training/center grants on both the Arts and Sciences and Medical School campuses. The funding sources for this work range from federal and state agencies to private foundations to industrial sources. His research group’s work has resulted in over 70 publications and 5 issued patents. The publications include 6 invited book chapters and reviews and these publications have over 1400 citations listed in Web of Science/ISI’s Science Citation Index. In 2008, he was elected a fellow in the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) for “distinguished contributions to the field of organometallic chemistry, particularly for metal mediated cyclization and cycloaddition reactions.”

He enjoys his responsibilities as a teacher and mentor and has taught courses in the Departments of Chemistry and Cancer Biology. To date, he has served as research adviser to 8 senior scientists/postdoctoral fellows, 26 graduate students (23 supervised completed graduate theses to date (14 Ph.D., 9 M.S.)), and 79 undergraduate, community college and high school research students (10 Honors theses completed to date). His efforts as a mentor were recognized on the national level during the years of 1994-99 when he was named as a Dreyfus Teacher- Scholar by the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation.

He and his wife have two children who both graduated from UNC-CH.