Mike Jung received his Bachelor of Arts in 1969 from Rice University, doing research with Richard Turner, and then his PhD in 1973 from Columbia, where he worked with Gilbert Stork. After a one-year NATO postdoctoral fellowship with Albert Eschenmoser at the ETH in Zurich, he joined the faculty at UCLA in 1974. He has risen through the ranks at UCLA and is now a Distinguished Professor of Chemistry. He has served as a reviewer of proposals for various organizations, e.g., NSF, PRF, NIH Medicinal Chemistry Study Section, Research Corporation and others. He is on the Scientific Advisory Boards of several pharmaceutical firms and consults currently for more than 20 industrial laboratories in both the biotech and big pharma settings. Professor Jung is an authority on synthetic organic and medicinal chemistry and has more than 25 patents arising from both his consulting activities and his own research. His current interests include the easy preparation of hindered systems via both Diels-Alder reactions using a new mixed Lewis acid catalyst and via an unusual formal [3,3]-sigmatropic rearrangement. He has also pioneered the use of epoxide rearrangements in synthesis (e.g., the non-aldol aldol) and has investigated new types of gem-disubstituent effects in synthesis. He has published more than 250 articles in refereed journals and has given over 470 lectures on his research, including lectures in German and French. Finally one of his recent compounds is in Phase 1/2a clinical trials for the treatment of hormone refractory prostate cancer.