John Hartwig is the Henry Rapoport Professor of Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley. He received the 2019 Wolf Prize in Chemistry. His research aims to find new metal-catalysed reactions, and he was one of the developers of the Buchwald-Hartwig amination, one of the most-used reactions in drug discovery. He spoke with Katrina Krämer at the 2019 American Chemical Society national meeting in Orlando, Florida.
Scientists who scanned the skies above dozens of U.S. cities have made a surprising discovery about the smog that’s suspended over Los Angeles: one of its key ingredients isn’t disappearing as fast as it once did. The finding may help explain why the once-steady improvements in air quality have come close to stalling out here even though nitrogen oxide emissions have continued to decline. It also suggests that the particular chemistry of L.A.'s air may complicate future cleanup efforts. “That’s certainly part of why we’re in a moment in Los Angeles where it’s harder to get the air cleaner,” said Professor Ronald Cohen.
When Chu-Moyer was tapped to head up the research and chemistry groups across Amgen’s three U.S. R&D sites in 2014, she knew she would have to make some changes for the company to succeed in bringing a KRAS inhibitor into clinical trials, along with other novel treatments for cancer, cardiovascular disease and neurological disorders. For one, she needed to improve the collaboration between scientists who had different areas of expertise—and who lived and worked in different zip codes.
In the modern age of pharmacology, some of the newest heroes in the war against human disease are biologists and chemists working in chemical proteomics. Among the leaders in this research is the Novartis-Berkeley Center for Proteomics and Chemistry Technologies (NB-CPACT), a joint venture linking Novartis, a large pharmaceutical company, and the world’s leading public research university. Launched in October 2017, the center is developing new technologies to further the discovery of next-generation therapeutics for cancer and other diseases.
Professor Emeritus Klaas Bergmann has been awarded the 2020 Davisson-Germer Prize in Atomic or Surface Physics by APS Physics “for the invention of Stimulated Raman Adiabatic Passage (STIRAP) that became universally used for coherent transfer in quantum systems with unprecedented efficiency and robustness."
Dr. Lisa Onishi, Chemical Engineer, Researcher and Senior Process Engineer at Intel, has been recognized with the Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award for her "dedication, achievements, and leadership as a professional engineer".
George Pimentel was a famous physical chemist and is renowned for having conducted work that is the pinnacle of UC Berkeley’s research in chemistry. The inventor of the chemical laser, Pimentel died in 1989 in Kensington, California. While the scientist did achieve great success on our campus, no one expected him to return to UC Berkeley from beyond the grave. Nonetheless, in 1990, the rumors started. Copies of the periodic table started cropping up around campus. Chemistry students in lab in Latimer Hall started hearing voices telling them how to correctly perform their experiments...."
In a new publication released by ACS Publications, Dean Toste (Gerald E.K.Branch Distinguished Professor of Chemistry) joins Shu-Li You (Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry) penning the introduction to "Asymmetric Synthesis Enabled by Organometallic Complexes", a special edition on asymmetric synthesis enabled by organometallic complexes. According to the authors, "Chiral molecules in their enantioenriched or enantiopure forms today are targets of great significance for their widespread applications, ranging from medicinal chemistry to materials science. Asymmetric synthesis enabled by organometallic complexes is one of the preeminent routes toward these targets."
UC Berkeley has announced it tops the list of public universities in global rankings by U.S. News & World Report for the fifth straight year. For the third year in a row, the campus ranks fourth-best overall among publics and privates. Across 23 subject ratings, UC Berkeley ranked first in chemistry; second in environment/ecology; third in economics and business, space science and in physics; fourth in biology and biochemistry and in plant and animal science; and fifth in mathematics, materials science and in engineering.
We hear a lot about bad air quality in California. And, it’s hard to know what to do about it. But thanks to a 2017 law, two Bay Area communities known for their air pollution are helping set their own air quality policies. But what does putting air pollution in the hands of the people really look like? In this Cross Currents report from KALW, reporter Brett Simpson attends an important community air quality meeting in Richmond as a committee of residents decide how much monitoring they should do before putting stricter standards in place. Richmond, California has some of the worst air pollution in the country. The committee was divided between more monitoring and wanting to enact stricter standards now.
Learn about Martin Head-Gordon, a theoretical chemist at the University of California, Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and a recently elected member of the National Academy of Sciences. He develops electronic structure theory to permit improved calculations of molecules, including the strength of chemical bonds. To better understand how and why bonds form, he also works on energy decomposition analysis (EDA), which gives the value of physically different contributions to chemical bonds.
Birgitta Whaley, a UC Berkeley professor of chemistry and co-director of the Berkeley Quantum Information and Computation Center, has been appointed to the U.S. President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), the White House announced on Tuesday, Oct. 22. Whaley, who is also a faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, was among seven new advisers, the first PCAST members appointed by President Donald Trump since his inauguration three years ago. Upon signing an executive order this morning launching PCAST, President Trump indicated that he would appoint another nine advisers, for a total of 16.
Alumnus Terry Rosen, the CEO of Arcus Biosciences, and his wife, Tori, have donated $25 million to the College of Chemistry for a building to be named in honor of Terry Rosen’s beloved mentor and former chemistry dean, Clayton Heathcock. Rosen, who obtained his Ph.D. in 1985 while working in Heathcock’s lab, has fond memories of the four years he spent at UC Berkeley and decided that naming a building after Heathcock was a great way to say, ‘Thank you.’
Harold Urey worked for the Manhattan Project. But by contrast, the Nobel-prize winning chemist distanced himself from nuclear weapons development after the war. His search for science beyond defense work prompted a shift into studying the origins of life and lunar geology. Now, this absorbing biography "The Life and Science of Harold C. Urey" by science historian Matthew Shindell, uses the researcher’s life to show how a conscientious chemist navigated the cold war.
In the mid-1970s, Professor of Chemistry, Physics and, Molecular and Cell Biology Carlos J. Bustamante, left Peru to go to graduate school in the US. He intended to return, but political and economic turmoil prevented that. He wound up staying for a postdoc. He then joined the chemistry faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, where he works on single-molecule manipulation and detection. 
The company, called 4D Molecular Therapeutics Inc., doesn't expect to put its first three experimental single-shot cures for a range of diseases into clinical trials until next year. Yet it already has key partnerships with well-known drug makers Roche, AstraZeneca plc and gene therapy pioneer uniQure NV. Founders David Schaffer, The Hubbard Howe Jr. Distinguished Professor of Biochemical Engineering, and Dr. David Kirn have worked on so-called "viral vectors" — the protein shells ridden by viruses to skip through the body — since before the company was formed in 2013. In gene therapy, those vehicles are engineered to remove the disease-triggering part of a virus and used instead to carry correct versions of genes to replace mutated genes.
How can the makers of Goretex produce waterproof gear without toxic perfluorinated chemicals? How might an enzyme found in plants and fungi help Levi Strauss & Co. keep their brand of khakis wrinkle-free? Is it possible to make an effective sunscreen that doesn’t damage coral reefs? A novel collaboration between the School of Public Health and the College of Chemistry through the Berkeley Center for Green Chemistry (BCGC) is leading the nation in reimagining chemistry education to reduce waste, develop safer chemicals, and achieve sustainability. 
Berkeley chemist John Arnold fell under the table’s spell while still a high school student in Lancashire, England. For Arnold, now a professor and undergraduate dean of the College of Chemistry, Mendeleev’s creation has a magic about it. “It really is, I think, one of the greatest scientific accomplishments of all time,” Arnold says. “We can relate things that happen in our lives every day to that one simple, two-dimensional picture.”
A new Master of Molecular Science and Software Engineering (MSSE) degree program offered by the College of Chemistry in collaboration with the College of Engineering is now accepting applications for Fall 2020. MSSE's online, part-time program is an exciting and novel way to address industry's increasing demands in a workforce trained in multidisciplinary skills while offering students flexibility.
Prominent heavy-element chemist Polly Arnold has been elected a member of Academia Europaea. Her research focuses on advancing our understanding of the bonding and reactivity of heavy elements, the elements of the f-block of the periodic table. Arnold was recently appointed Chemical Sciences Division Director at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). Concurrent with her role at Berkeley Lab, she will also join the Chemistry Department faculty at UC Berkeley in January 2020.
The Welch Foundation, one of the nation’s largest sources of private funding for basic chemical research, has announced that Drs. Armand Paul Alivisatos and Charles M. Lieber are the 2019 recipients of the prestigious Robert A. Welch Award in Chemistry. Highly-respected and influential leaders in the fields of nanoscience and nanotechnology, Drs. Alivisatos and Lieber are being recognized for their important research contributions which have had a significant, positive impact on humankind.