Nicewicz completed his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Chemistry at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte with Professor Craig Ogle. He then moved to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he completed his Ph.D. in 2006 with Professor Jeffrey S. Johnson. His graduate research focused on novel Brook Rearrangement transformations and he completed the total synthesis of Zaragozic Acid C. Following his graduate education, he joined David MacMillan’s lab as a postdoc. During this time, he pioneered the use of ruthenium photoredox catalysis in combination with chiral amine organocatalysis to develop a general method for enantioselective aldehyde alkylation and more importantly, establishing photoredox catalysis as an emerging tool in organic synthesis.
In 2009, Nicewicz returned to the UNC Chapel Hill as an Assistant Professor. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 2015, full Professor in 2018 and was named the first Royce Murray Term Professor of Chemistry at UNC Chapel Hill in 2020. He is now the W.R. Kenan, Jr. Distinguished Professor since 2024. His research interests focus on organic photoredox catalysis and their application in radioisotope labelling and natural product synthesis.
Nicewicz has also earned several awards throughout his career including the ACS Cope Scholar Award (2022), The Hirata Award (Nagoya University, 2017), Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award and the Eli Lilly Grantee Award (2015).