In his career, he has graduated 55 students with PhD’s and training in biological and medicinal chemistry and all aspects of drug discovery from conception through clinical trials. Thatcher founded a campus-wide and disease-agnostic drug discovery center at UIC, focused on small molecule drug discovery, which continues to play an active role in academic drug discovery across Chicago. Dr. Thatcher created his first start-up biotech company in 1997, which successfully took an Alzheimer’s drugs into human clinical trials and continues to move his research forwards directly to benefit human health.