Born and raised in Trenton, NJ, Dr. Bowers obtained his BA from the University of Chicago and went on to complete his Ph.D. in organic chemistry in 2007, at the University of Illinois at Chicago, under the guidance of Prof. David Crich. He was an NIH postdoctoral fellow in the labs of Professor Robert M. Williams at Colorado State University and Professor Christopher T. Walsh at Harvard Medical School, where he studied the chemistry and biosynthesis of peptide-based natural products. In 2012, he joined the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2012. He is jointly appointed in the School of Pharmacy and Department of Chemistry. The labs research focuses on biochemical and biosynthetic methods for the discovery of new peptide therapeutics, including mRNA display and macrocycles. For this work, Dr. Bowers has won a number of awards including the Beckman Young Investigator Award and Young Investigator Award of the Boulder Peptide Society.