Professor Nels Gerstner was born in Fort Collins, Colorado, and attended college at Montana State University in Bozeman where he earned his B.S. in chemistry in 2013. He then went on to the University of Wisconsin-Madison for graduate school, joining Professor Jennifer Schomaker’s group where he focused on developing new synthetic strategies targeting challenging amine-containing motifs. After earning his Ph.D. in 2019, he joined Professor Evan Miller’s group at the University of California-Berkeley where he developed new fluorescent probes for imaging applications. Now a PI at the University of Iowa, Nels is leveraging his expertise in complex molecule synthesis, chemical biology and synthetic methods development to design and synthesize new scaffolds directed at addressing emerging biological applications.