Brent Stockwell is an associate professor in the Departments of Biological Sciences and Chemistry. He is also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. His research group, which works at the interface of chemistry and biology, uses small organic molecules in a systematic way to perturb cellular processes and discover their underlying mechanisms. Stockwell’s approach is interdisciplinary, combining chemical design and synthesis with genomics, computational chemistry, biochemistry, and cell biology, with the ultimate goal of revealing new basic biological mechanisms and disease pathophysiology. The small organic molecules he uses are complementary to genetic tools, because such compounds act rapidly and conditionally, can target multiple paralogous proteins simultaneously, and can be readily combined for multi-dimensional manipulations of biochemical networks. His laboratory is particularly interested in understanding cell death mechanisms in mammalian systems, and how they intersect with disease mechanisms in cancer and neurodegeneration.