Our future lies with our young faculty members

It's hard to believe that in a few months, I will have been the chair for almost a year. It's been a busy and rewarding time, with a very steep learning curve. Many past chairs warned me that the first year would be difficult, and they were correct. I'll tell you briefly about what has been happening in the department and about the many honors and awards our faculty has received, but I'd also like to try something a little different in this column.

The future of the department lies with its young faculty members. We currently have nine assistant professors in the department, and I would like you to get to know them better. In my next several columns, I'll have the assistant professors introduce themselves and tell you more about their interests. We'll start with Phillip Geissler, a theoretical chemist. But first, here is a brief roundup of events and awards:

News Items

In its annual rankings of America's best graduate schools, U.S. News & World Report magazine ranked the Department of Chemistry in first place, tied with MIT. Although its methodology does not have the credibility of that used by the National Research Council in its ratings (last produced in 1995), the results are similar. The top five chemistry departments are the same in both rankings, with Berkeley in first place in both (alone in the NRC rankings). The updated NRC rankings are expected to be available in late 2007.

The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Molecular Foundry was inaugurated in March. The foundry is the first of five proposed U.S. Department of Energy Nanoscale Science Research Centers and the only one on the West Coast. The foundry is a user facility for nanoscale materials, dedicated to supporting research in nanoscience at institutions around the world. Users from academia, government and industrial laboratories may write proposals requesting free access to the resources housed there.

Chemistry Professor Carolyn Bertozzi is the Director of the foundry, replacing Chemistry Professor Paul Alivisatos, who has become Associate Director of LBNL. Of the six specialized facilities at the foundry, three are led by chemistry department faculty: Bertozzi directs the biological nanostructures facility, Alivisatos directs the inorganic nanostructures facility, and Professor Jean Fréchet directs the organic nanostructures facility.

Awards

"What has made Berkeley an incomparable environment . . . is the wealth of opportunities for collaboration."

Professor Bill Lester was among four recipients of the 2006 Chancellor's Award for Advancing Institutional Excellence, which acknowledges meritorious achievement by faculty in pursuit of the university's mission to create an inclusive environment to serve the needs of our increasingly diverse state.

Assistant Professor Dean Toste has won the American Chemical Society's Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award. This award, which recognizes and encourages excellence in organic chemistry, consists of $5,000, a certificate, and a $40,000 unrestricted research grant to be assigned by the recipient to any university or nonprofit institution. Toste will deliver an awards address at the Arthur C. Cope Symposium held as part of the ACS national meeting to be held this September in San Francisco.

Lecturer Michelle Douskey has been selected as a recipient of the 2006 Faculty Award for Outstanding Mentorship of GSIs. The award is bestowed on behalf of the Graduate Council's Advisory Committee for GSI Affairs, the GSI Teaching and Resource Center, and the Alumni Association.

Professor Emeritus Robert Harris has been honored with a special edition of Molecular Physics. Jeff Cina (Ph.D. '85, Chem), a professor of theoretical physical chemistry at the University of Oregon, wrote a biographical essay on his friend and former research director for the special issue, published on April 20. Harris is in the beginning stages of writing a book summarizing the many advances in the theory of chirality over the last couple of decades. He is the source of many of those advances. Says Harris, "None of my work would be possible without the inspiration and model of my wife, Christine. She played a role far beyond that of a 'supportive wife,' and was essential to my ceasing to be a goof-off and learning to work, and to my development as a scientist."

Thanks to the intellectual strength of our young faculty, the Department of Chemistry has earned three of the six Sloan Foundation Research Fellowships awarded to the University of California, Berkeley, this year. Jamie Doudna Cate, Phillip Geissler and Haw Yang will each receive $45,000 over the next two years to help establish their research programs. On a campus as rich in talent as UC Berkeley, it's a distinct honor for our department to earn half of the prestigious Sloan Fellowships awarded to the University.

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Phillip Geissler also won a five-year, $625,000 Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. An average of 16 of these fellowships have been awarded annually since 1988 to allow the nation's most promising professors to pursue science and engineering research early in their careers with few funding restrictions and limited paperwork requirements. Geissler also won the department's teaching award this year.

Professor Matthew Francis has won the Donald Sterling Noyce teaching award. This award was endowed by Intel cofounder Robert Noyce in honor of his brother and our late undergraduate dean.

Finally, I would be remiss if I failed to mention that I have been elected to the National Academy of Sciences. To say that I am very pleased and honored is certainly an understatement. I am also grateful beyond words to the students I have worked with and learned from over the years. Their excitement, dedication and ideas are responsible for the recognition given by the NAS election.

Meet Phillip Geissler

And now here is more about one of our outstanding assistant professors, Phillip Geissler, in his own words:

Following undergraduate studies at Cornell University, I entered graduate school in Berkeley's Department of Chemistry in 1996. My graduate work, under the tutelage of David Chandler, focused on several aspects of dynamics in liquids, with a focus on deducing microscopic reaction mechanisms from computer simulations. An amusing note from my graduate school days: I was my colleague Haw Yang's GSI for Chem 220B, a course on advanced theoretical methods in statistical mechanics, which Haw had no business taking but aced nonetheless.

I received my Ph.D. in 2000 and remained at Berkeley for a few months as a postdoc with Chandler. My first extended postdoctoral appointment, with Eugene Shakhnovich at Harvard, began in 2001. We investigated how protein-like polymers respond to pulling from their ends, trying to explain and explore the kinds of experiments Carlos Bustamante has made famous.

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Late in 2001, I moved down the street to MIT, where I was a Science Fellow (an autonomous postdoc) until 2003. My independent work there ranged from the theory of ultrafast hydrogen bond dynamics in liquid water to modeling the spontaneous organization of nanocrystals in solution. In July 2003 I returned to Berkeley to join the faculty.

My current group of ten students and postdocs studies a variety of chemical phenomena in which fluctuations and disorder shape the behavior of biological and materials systems. Our interests include flexibility of biopolymers such as DNA, mechanics and growth of polymer networks like those that determine the shape and size of human cells, hydration of ions in non-uniform environments, self-assembly of complex structures from simple microscopic components, and the variety of ways to pack amino acid side-chains within dense protein structures.

Our work on actin networks has generated very interesting results, demonstrating that cross-linked biopolymers in cells behave neither as one would expect from the mechanics of a single molecule, nor as one would expect from a continuous elastic medium. We believe this finding illustrates a basic theme of living systems, whose components collectively achieve results neither a single molecule nor a macroscopic collection of molecules could. By constructing reduced models of these systems, we aim to highlight and discover the design principles biology uses both to overcome and to exploit fluctuations that are inescapable on the molecular scale.

My return to Berkeley has been a thrilling, though harried, experience. One of the greatest pleasures of my time as a professor is the unwavering personal and professional support of colleagues in the department, some of whom seemed quite intimidating when I was a graduate student! What has made Berkeley an incomparable environment for research at the faculty level is the wealth of opportunities for collaboration, especially with young people who are naive and enthusiastic enough to try almost anything. It is difficult to imagine how I could have become involved in so many fascinating collaborative explorations anywhere else.top