Ass.-Prof. Dr. David B. Konrad

David grew up in Grafertshofen, a village close to the town Weißenhorn in the beautiful swabian region of bavaria. He moved to Munich to study chemistry and biochemistry at the Ludwig Maximilians University Munich with an undergraduate scholarship of the Friedrich-Ebert-Foundation and received his B.Sc. in 2011. Before graduating, David joined the JCEMolChem Exchange program and spent one semester at the University of Ottawa where he pursued undergraduate research with Chris Boddy. During his Master's studies, he specialized in asymmetric catalysis as a visiting researcher in the lab of Dean Toste at the University of California, Berkeley and the lab of Benjamin List at the Max Planck Institute for Coal Research in Mülheim a. d. Ruhr for his Master’s thesis. In 2014, David joined the group of Dirk Trauner for his graduate studies to work towards an asymmetric synthesis of tetrodotoxin, which was funded by a Ph.D. scholarship from the Friedrich-Ebert-Foundation. Motivated by his strong interest in medicinal chemistry, he couldn't resist spending part of his time on developing glutamate- and lipid-based photopharmaceuticals as well as methods to red-shift photoswitchable ligands. After graduating in 2018 summa cum laude, David moved to the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla as an Outgoing LMU Research Fellow to conduct postdoctoral research under the guidance of Ben Cravatt. His research focused on the implementation of new concepts for chemical proteomics-guided fragment-based ligand discovery using cysteine-targeted and photoaffinity probes. As part of the return phase of his LMU Research Fellowship in the group of Ivan Huc, David worked on the synthesis and evaluation of foldameric B-DNA charge surface mimics as probes to identify proteins within the epigenetic machinery of the drosophila proteome that recognize DNA through the negative charge surface alone. In 2021, David joined the Pharmaceutical Chemistry Section of the Department of Pharmacy at the LMU Munich as a Liebig Fellow and built an interdisciplinary research group working at the interface of synthetic organic and medicinal chemistry, cancer chemical biology and (chemo)proteomics to develop new therapeutic approaches to treat Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer and cancer-related pain. 

In 2025, he moved to University of Vienna where he is an Assistant Professor for “Modern Methods in Drug Synthesis” in the Pharmaceutical Chemistry Division within the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences.