News

Kavli Nanoscience Institute Directors Paul Alivisatos, Paul McEuen, and Nai-Chang Yeh – discuss what makes the nanoscale so important, the field’s grand challenges, safety challenges, and their thoughts on funding, training and the future.

Ann E. Pitzer (M.S. '60, HomeEc), a trustee of the Pitzer Family Foundation, died of cancer on October 15 at the age of 77. She lived in La Jolla and Kelseyville, CA.

Chemistry professor Carolyn Bertozzi will take the helm as editor-in-chief of the American Chemical Society’s first fully open-access journal, ACS Central Science. The new journal is set to launch in early 2015.

The Berkeley Center for Green Chemistry (BCGC) has won two major grants. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has awarded more than $335,000 to BCGC and the California Department of Toxic Substances Control for projects to help businesses and manufacturers reduce hazardous chemicals in consumer products.

Ten years ago, Robert Waterland got an associate professorship at Baylor College of Medicine and set off to study one of the nation's most pressing health problems: obesity. In particular, he's been trying to figure out the biology behind why children born to obese women are more likely to develop the condition themselves.

1.7 million treatments of semisynthetic artemisinin have shipped to Africa, where they will treat malaria sufferers in Burkina Faso, Burundi, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Liberia, Niger and Nigeria over the next few months. This shipment is the culmination of a 13-year project in the lab of CBE professor Jay Keasling. Enough semisynthetic artemisinin has been produced for 70 million treatments, and the capacity exists to produce 100-150 million treatments annually.

Chemistry professor and former executive associate dean David E. Wemmer is the new chair of the Department of Chemistry. On July 1, Wemmer took over from Dan Neumark, who had chaired the department for four years.

Emerita chemistry professor Judith Klinman has won the 2015 Mildred Cohn Award in Biological Chemistry. The award will be presented by the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB) at the society’s next annual meeting, March 28 – April 1, 2015, at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center, Boston, MA.

Chemistry Professor John Hartwig has been awarded the 2014 Janssen Pharmaceutica Prize for Creativity in Organic Synthesis. The prize will be delivered after the lecture Hartwig will give at a symposium on Thursday, July 17, at the Belgian Organic Synthesis Symposium (BOSS).