About Richard Hsung
Richard Hsung, born in China, was one of the first teenagers to immigrate to the U.S. from Mainland China after China reopened to the West in 1978. Like many in the Perkins Family, he attended Milton Academy, a prep school near Boston.
In 1984, he went to live with the younger sister of a close family friend who had worked with Edward Perkins, MD, at the Water of Life Hospital in Kiukiang, China: Louise Ploeg, RN, a Dutch-American in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He received a B.S. in Chemistry and Mathematics at Calvin, working in Professors Ron Blankespoor and Ken Piers' laboratories. He received an M.S. and a Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry at the University of Chicago under the supervision of Professors Jeff Winkler and Bill Wulff. After pursuing postdoctoral research at Chicago with Professor Larry Sita, he completed his training as a National Institutes of Health Postdoctoral Fellow with Professor Gilbert Stork at Columbia University.
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AN AMERICAN ORGANIC CHEMIST AND PROFESSOR OF PHARMACEUTICAL SCIENCES.
Richard began his independent academic career at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities (UMN), where he received a National Science Foundation Career Award and was the Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar, the McKnight Professor of Chemistry, and Robert Wood Johnson Pharmaceutical Research Institute Investigator.
From 2006 to 2022, he was at the University of Wisconsin–Madison (UW–Madison), where he was an Eli Lilly Open Innovation Drug Discovery Awardee, one of the 15 Most Prolific Authors for The American Chemical Society Journal Organic Letters, the Laura and Edward Kremers Professor of Natural Products Chemistry, and the University of Wisconsin–Madison Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor. Between 2008 and 2016, Richard also served as a visiting professor at UCLA, HKU, NTU, TJU, and RIKEN. Over his academic career, Richard co-authored more than 250 publications, book chapters, and reviews, delivered more than 200 invited lectures, and supervised some 200 students and postdoctoral fellows.
Photo Caption: From left: Dr. Sarah C. Mangelsdorf, the UW-Madison Provost, Richard, and Dr. Rebecca M. Blank, the Late UW-Madison Chancellor, at the 2018 Vilas Award Ceremony.
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AN INDEPENDENT EDITOR AND AUTHOR.
In 2014, Richard Hsung’s mother, Dr. Jean Tren-Hwa Perkins, passed away in Brookline, Massachusetts, after a 15-year battle with dementia. Richard agreed to complete her unfinished memoir, Spring Flower, and spent the next ten years editing it and seeing it through to publication. This three-volume history, published by Earnshaw Books chronicles her life as an adopted child of American medical missionaries, which began shortly after the catastrophic Yangtze River Flood in 1931 that killed millions.