ABC honors Chinese professor with Farnsworth award

The American Botanical Council has given its annual ABC Norman R. Farnsworth Excellence in Botanical Research Award  to professor De-an Guo, PhD, of Shanghai, China.

Guo’s research has centered on  the quality control, biochemistry and metabolism of Traditional Chinese Medicine ingredients. His phytochemical investigations of traditional Chinese herbal medicines have resulted in the identification of 100 new chemical entities.

 In addition to his professorship, Dr. Guo serves as director of the State Engineering Laboratory for TCM Standardization Technology and as director of the Shanghai Research Center for TCM Modernization at the Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He earned his doctorate in pharmacognosy from Beijing Medical University’s School of Pharmaceutical Sciences in 1990, and conducted his postdoctoral studies in the department of chemistry and biochemistry at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas.

Among his many accomplishments, including more than 430 published scientific papers to date, Dr. Guo acted as the vice-editor-in-chief of the 2005 edition of the Pharmacopoeia of the People’s Republic of China and editor-in-chief of the 2010 edition.

Guo sits on the editorial boards of several highly respected international scientific journals and is an expert committee member of the United States Pharmacopeia and a member of the ABC Advisory Board.



“Professor Guo is not only an established scientist, he has provided leadership in the modernization of TCM,” said past recipient of ABC’s Farnsworth Award, Professor Ikhlas Khan, PhD, a research professor of pharmacognosy and associate director of the National Center for Natural Products Research at the University of Mississippi. 

The Excellence in Botanical Research Award’s namesake is ABC’s co-founding Board of Trustees member, the late Professor Norman R. Farnsworth, PhD, a research professor of pharmacognosy and senior university scholar in the College of Pharmacy at the University of Illinois – Chicago.