David Kingston received his B.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Cambridge University in 1960 and 1964, and is a University Distinguished Professor of Chemistry Emeritus at Virginia Tech and the founder and former Director of the Virginia Tech Center for Drug Discovery. He has worked extensively on drug discovery from natural products, with a recent emphasis on the discovery and mechanism of action of antimalarial agents from the former Merck collection of natural product extracts. He is a recipient of the Research Achievement Award of the American Society of Pharmacognosy and of the ACS Guenther Award for Natural Products.