College and Campus News
Click here to read Steve Fodor's speech
On
May 22, the College of Chemistry came together to celebrate the achievements
of our graduating students. For the first time, the college awarded bachelor’s
degrees in chemical biology.
The
graduating class this year (students finishing their requirements from
summer 2003 to spring 2004) breaks down as follows:
- B.S.
Chemical Engineering—91
- B.S.
Chemistry—59
- A.B.
Chemistry—6
- B.S.
Chemical Biology—2
- M.S.
Chemical Engineering—5
- M.S.
Chemistry—9
- Ph.D.
Chemical Engineering—13
- Ph.D. Chemistry—66
Katherine Lee Wong, Chemical Engineering
and
Michael Moshe Goodblatt, Chemistry
Awards
Departmental
Citation in Chemical Engineering
Paul William Loscutoff
Departmental
Citation in Chemistry
Brian Alexander Wong
Erich
O. & Elly M. Saegebarth Prize in Chemistry
Thomas John Maimone
and
Anh H. Pham
Mabel
Kittredge Wilson Prize
Sernyik Raymen Chee
George
C. Pimentel Award
Irena Dragojevic
Northern
California Section Award of the AIChE
Lisa Marie Hochrein
Anna Bao Zhen Guan
and
Rebecca Nicole Loy
Hypercube Scholar Award
Chunliang Yu
John
M. Prausnitz Award for Outstanding Undergraduate Research in Chemical
Engineering
Vannarith Matthew Leang
Glenn
T. Seaborg Award for Outstanding Undergraduate Research in Chemistry
Cathy Waichee Hau
Departmental
Teaching Awards
Chemical Engineering—Professor Alexander Katz
Chemistry Professor—Kristie A. Boering
Commencement Speaker
This
year’s commencement speaker is Stephen P. A. Fodor, Chairman and
Chief Executive Officer of Affymetrix, Inc. Dr. Fodor received his B.S.
in biology and M.S. in biochemistry from Washington State University and
his Ph.D. in chemistry from Princeton University. From 1986 to 1989, he
was a National Institutes of Health postdoctoral fellow at the University
of California, Berkeley, working on time-resolved spectroscopy of bacterial
and plant pigments.
In
1989 he was recruited to the Affymax Research Institute, where he spearheaded
the effort to develop high-density arrays of biological compounds. Dr.
Fodor and colleagues were the first to develop and describe microarray
technologies and combinatorial chemistry synthesis. These methods have
been applied to construct high density arrays of peptides and oligonucleotides
on small glass substrates (chips). These arrays enable hundreds of thousands
of assays to be carried out and detected in a rapid parallel format.
In
1993, Dr. Fodor co-founded Affymetrix, where the chip technology has been
used to synthesize many varieties of high density oligonucleotide arrays
containing hundreds of thousands of DNA probes. In 2001, he founded Perlegen,
Inc., a new venture that applied the chip technology on uncovering the
basic patterns of human diversity.
Dr. Fodor’s commencement speech : “Challenges and Opportunities in the Genetic Age.”