News

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).

Chemistry professor Evan Williams has received the Royal Society of Chemistry’s 2014 Theophilus Redwood Award. The award is given to a leading analytical scientist who is also an outstanding communicator.

Douglas Clark, dean of the College of Chemistry and the Gilbert Newton Lewis Professor, has helped develop a new type of biochip that emulates the three-dimensional structure and the metabolism of a human liver. The device could one day eliminate the need to harvest and use liver cells from human cadavers to test the toxicity of potential new drugs and drug candidates.

From MRS-TV, a description of work at UC Berkeley on carbon dioxide capture from an exhaust stream of a power plant.

William Lee Jolly (1927-2014), emeritus professor of chemistry at UC Berkeley, whose work helped facilitate the renaissance of inorganic chemistry in the United States during the middle of the 20th century, died of heart failure on January 10, 2014, at Kaiser Medical Center in Richmond, CA. He was 86.

College of Chemistry editor Michael Barnes is now tweeting chemistry and other science news. Barnes gets several press releases and other news items via email every day, and he has been looking for a way to share them with alums who want to keep up the the latest science news.