Barbara N Timmermann

Dr. Timmermann joined the School of Pharmacy in August of 2005, where she served as Chair of the Department of Medicinal Chemistry from August 2005 to December 2012. She also served as Interim Dean of the School of Pharmacy for a year. Dr. Timmermann is a trained biologist and a natural products chemist, and her research and scholarly activities have made important contributions to numerous interdisciplinary programs and centers supported by the National Institutes of Health and other federal agencies.

Her research interests include safety and efficacy studies of botanical dietary supplements, biodiversity prospecting for drug lead discovery from plants; isolation and chemical characterization of biologically active molecules (e.g., terpenoids, alkaloids, phenolics); method development to improve purification and characterization of complex botanical products; chemotaxonomy and interaction of natural products with organic anion transporter proteins in hepatocytes and enterocytes. Through a research funded by NIH/National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM)/Office of Dietary Supplements, Dr. Timmermann examined turmeric and ginger’s traditional uses as anti-inflammatory botanicals. She also has conducted pre-clinical in vitro and in vivo studies, proving efficacy and identifying mechanisms of action in rheumatoid arthritis (RA), and evaluated the chemistry and therapeutic potential of turmeric dietary supplements as preventive or adjuvant treatment for breast cancer bone metastases.

She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the American Society of Pharmacognosy (ASP). In 2019, she was selected by the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services to serve as a National Institutes of Health (NIH/NCCIH) National Advisory Council Member. She was inducted into the University of Kansas Inducted to Women's Hall of Fame in 2014.

Read more about Barbara Timmermann on the Department of Medicinal Chemistry website.