ROOM TO GROW IN

I am sitting here in the chair's office writing my first NewsJournal piece for the department. I realize that what I want most is for you to read on. How do I entice you to do that when there so many things that compete for the limited time we all have? I thought this would be difficult, but it isn't—it's an extremely exciting time to be in the Department of Chemistry, and I'd like to give you some examples of why this is so. Many people have asked me why I decided to become chair—some have taken it to mean that my hold on reality left me. Not true and, in fact, quite the opposite. In the four short years that I have been at Berkeley, I have come to appreciate the steady and continued focus of our students and faculty on pushing the limits of chemistry into traditional areas and into new interdisciplinary endeavors. Chemistry is indeed a healthy science and at Berkeley is a vital and thriving enterprise.

New Stanley

"The Molecular Foundry at LBNL will serve as an international center for research in the emerging field of nanoscience—the study of materials and structures one to one hundred billionths of a meter in size."

Some of our new chemistry will take place in the structure being built across the way. Old Stanley Hall is long gone, and new Stanley is well on the way to completion. The new building is much larger but, more important, it will be filled in a unique way for Berkeley. It will not be "owned" by a single department but will house research groups from many departments, including chemistry, molecular and cell biology, physics and others. It will be the campus's headquarters for QB3—the California Institute for Quantitative Biomedical Research—a joint venture of UC Berkeley, UC San Francisco and UC Santa Cruz. Several chemistry groups are slated to move in November of 2006. The philosophy and design intent is to provide a building to house interdisciplinary and interdependent laboratories that will lead the next revolution in biomedical research. The building will have 285,000 gross square feet and 155,000 assignable square feet at a cost of $162 million. Forty research labs are designed for tissue engineering, structural and chemical biology, physics and computational biology. The shared facilities will include space for NMR, electron microscopes, specialized optics (atomic force microscopes and optical tweezers), tissue culture, X-ray crystallography, mass spectrometry and light microscopy. This building presents a space opportunity for the department and is one of the reasons I decided that this is a good time to be chair.

Molecular Foundry

Another way of fostering interdisciplinary research is our long and distinguished association with LBNL. The proximity effect of its being just up the hill from the chemistry complex has certainly been a key factor. Many chemistry faculty members have played leading roles in LBNL research programs and management over the years. In fact, two of the last three Laboratory Directors, David Shirley and Charles Shank, were members of the department. This association will strengthen further with the January 2006 opening of the LBNL Molecular Foundry. One of five nanoscale science research centers established by the DOE Office of Science, the Foundry will serve as an international center for research in the emerging field of nanoscience—the study of materials and structures one to one hundred billionths of a meter in size. One of the most exciting discoveries in the past few years was that the fundamental properties of materials can change when they become that small and that many of these new properties (for example, melting point or light absorption and emission) can be exploited in new devices such as advanced solar cells. Because the Foundry is a DOE "user facility" its instruments, techniques and trained staff will be available to assist scientists from around the world in pursuing their research in the variety of fields that comprise nanoscience. It will also maintain its own internal research program.

Department faculty have been intimately involved in the Foundry to this point. Paul Alivisatos has been Foundry Director for the past three years. Although he is stepping down from this post to serve as Associate Director of LBNL, we expect our chemistry influence to remain very high. Key faculty involved are Jean Fréchet, Carolyn Bertozzi, Peidong Yang, Martin Head-Gordon, Gabor Somorjai, and Matt Francis.

Faculty Awards

Our faculty continue to be recognized for their outstanding contributions, largely due to the efforts of the students and postdocs who work so hard. Carlos Bustamante received an honorary doctorate from the University of Chicago; Carolyn Bertozzi was elected to the National Academy of Sciences; Jay Groves was awarded the Langmuir Lecture Award given by the ACS; John Hearst has been elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science; John Kuriyan is the recipient of the National Academy of Sciences Richard Lounsbery Award; Dan Neumark was given the William Meggers Award by the Optical Society of America; Kevan Shokat was appointed an investigator in the Howard Hughes Medical Institute; Angy Stacy was named a Distinguished Teaching Scholar by the National Science Foundation; and Dean Toste received the Pfizer Award for Creativity in Organic Chemistry.

Tragic Loss

We are still deeply saddened by the loss of three of our graduate students who were the victims of a tragic freeway accident on Interstate 80 in Berkeley in July. The students were Benjamin P. Boussert, 27, a sixth-year graduate student from Baton Rouge, LA; Jason L. Choy, 29, of Bowie, MD, a student completing his seventh year of a Ph.D. program in chemistry and molecular and cell biology; and Giulia A. Adesso, 26, a visiting scholar from Italy conducting research at UC Berkeley while pursuing a Ph.D. from the University of Lecce. Boussert and Adesso were members of the Alivisatos lab and Choy was a student with Bustamante. Boussert and Choy were awarded posthumous Ph.D.s and Adesso, who had worked in Alivisatos' laboratory since February 2004, was awarded a certificate of achievement. Our thoughts go out to their families; they will be missed (see page 32).