Dr. A. Dean Sherry, a distinguished scientist and educator who retired in 2022 after 50 years on the faculty of The University of Texas at Dallas, has been named a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors.
Sherry is one of 169 new fellows who will be inducted June 27 at the academy’s annual meeting in Washington, D.C.
Sherry’s career as an inventor began when he arrived on the UT Dallas campus in 1972 after earning his doctorate in chemistry from Kansas State University and completing a National Institutes of Health (NIH) postdoctoral fellowship at New Mexico State University. He was just the fourth faculty member in UTD’s chemistry department. Over the years, he established himself as a trailblazer in designing molecules called macrocyclic chelates for use in medical imaging and therapy.
Based on his pioneering synthesis and coordination chemistry, Sherry founded a company in the mid-1990s called Macrocyclics to produce specialized chemical compounds for the pharmaceutical industry and academic researchers. The Plano, Texas-based company, which started in a modest UTD lab with just a few products, has since grown to a global supplier of molecules that have advanced diagnostics and therapies for cancer and other diseases.
An inventor on 34 patents, Sherry has received numerous honors for his contributions to science, including being named fellow of the World Molecular Imaging Society and of the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine. His research over the past 50 years has been supported by the NIH, The Welch Foundation, the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas, and other public and private sources.
National Academy of Inventors Fellows
The National Academy of Inventors (NAI) Fellows Program highlights academic inventors who have demonstrated a spirit of innovation in creating or facilitating outstanding inventions that have made a tangible impact on the quality of life, economic development and the welfare of society.
The NAI fellow status is the highest professional distinction accorded solely to academic inventors. The program has more than 1,500 fellows representing more than 300 universities and governmental and nonprofit research institutes around the world.
“Dean Sherry has been a stalwart on our campus for half a century, and his extensive body of research on chelating agents and other biomolecules has had a tremendous effect in medical imaging and health care,” said Dr. David Hyndman, dean of the School of Natural Sciences and Mathematics (NSM) and the Francis S. and Maurine G. Johnson Distinguished University Chair. “His dedication to mentorship and academic engagement continues to inspire many students at UTD. His election to National Academy of Inventors fellow status is a well-deserved recognition of his contributions to science and society.”
From 1990 until 2022, Sherry also served as professor of radiology at UT Southwestern Medical Center. In 2005, he was named founding director of the Advanced Imaging Research Center (AIRC) — a joint research facility between UTD, UT Arlington and UT Southwestern. He served as director of the AIRC until 2019. After his retirement, UT Southwestern appointed him professor emeritus.
Sherry served as head of chemistry at UT Dallas from 1979 to 1990; held a Cecil H. and Ida Green Distinguished Chair in Systems Biology from 2005 to 2022; and served as interim dean of NSM in 2020. Over his career, he mentored more than 100 graduate students and postdoctoral researchers, and he initiated the Green Fellows program, which allows UT Dallas undergraduates to conduct laboratory research for a semester at UT Southwestern. Since the program began 18 years ago, 296 students have become Green Fellows.
In 2022, Sherry and his wife, Dr. Cynthia Sherry BS’78, made a $100,000 gift that established the Dean and Cindy Sherry Professorship in Chemistry, an endowment that will support the chemistry and biochemistry research-enhancing activities of the professorship holder.
“I am deeply honored to be elected a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors,” Sherry said. “I certainly did not consider myself an inventor when I joined UT Dallas, but I have been given every opportunity to expand my research interests from basic chemistry into medical applications, engage students in the joys of scientific discovery and develop my own entrepreneurial interests.”