Photo: Professor Richmond Sarpong
In honor of #BlackHistoryMonth, we celebrate our College's own Richmond Sarpong, Ph.D., born in Ghana, West Africa, and a professor of chemistry at UC Berkeley since 2004. He moved to the US in 1991 after a childhood and adolescent years in Ghana, Zambia, and Botswana, respectively.
His research focuses on identifying efficient ways to prepare natural products, which are compounds isolated from living organisms that form the basis for over 50% of the medicines that are currently on the market.
DESCRIBE THE MOMENT YOU REALIZED YOU'D BE DEDICATING YOUR LIFE TO SCIENCE.
This came early for me. I grew up in West Africa and at 5–7 years old, I saw firsthand the effect of ivermectin, which was distributed by Merck and the World Health Organization (WHO; ONCHO) on helping curb river blindness. I knew at that time that I wanted to contribute to helping cure people of disease using chemistry.
WHAT SCIENCE PROBLEM DO YOU FEEL CALLED TO SOLVE AND WHY?
I am very interested in a variety of problems in science. However, those that I am most passionate about involve how we can be architects to build molecules that can be of medicinal value. There isn't one particular problem I feel called to solve, but rather the larger issue of designing and building tools to create molecules in the most efficient way. I think that the advances in machine learning can help to accelerate this process.
HOW DOES YOUR UNIQUE LENS OF THE WORLD AID YOU IN SOLVING THIS PROBLEM?
I think I approach each problem I tackle in a very collaborative way. Having grown up in many countries, I take a global approach to problem solving. I bring together coworkers from very different backgrounds to help solve problems by bringing different perspectives to the table.
WHAT ARE YOUR HOPES FOR THE FUTURE OF SCIENCE?
That the field of chemistry in particular can continue to build a bigger tent to bring in more people of diverse backgrounds to contribute to the important problems ahead of us. For example, the sun's energy is essentially free and we have to find better ways to harness that energy. A part of the solution here would be to design and build the systems that can best capture the sun's energy.