Awards and Honors

College of Chemistry awards and honors featured in the news.

Rising from refugee roots to Nobel laureate

December 11, 2025
NHK World Japan
(NHK World Japan) Born to a Palestinian refugee family, Omar Yahgi has become one of three winners of this year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry for ground-breaking work in MOFs, or metal-organic frameworks.

CBE researcher named 2026 Jane Coffin Childs Fellow

June 26, 2026
By Veronica Bartell | College of Chemistry
Dr. Jing Li, a postdoctoral researcher in Dr. Shiyu Xia's lab within the Department of CBE, has been selected as a 2026 Fellow of the Jane Coffin Childs Memorial Fund for Medical Research (JCC Fund).

Philomathia Prize advances novel work on the physics of bioelectricity

June 23, 2026
by Blake Edgar, UC Berkeley Inspire
Karthik Shekhar, assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering (CBE) at UC Berkeley, the John F. Heil Jr. Professor, and a member of the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, has been selected as the fifth recipient of the Philomathia Prize.

Richmond Sarpong honoured with Royal Society of Chemistry Prize

June 17, 2026
Royal Society of Chemistry Press Release
The Pedler Prize is one of the Royal Society of Chemistry's Research & Innovation Prizes, given in celebration of exceptional people advancing the chemical sciences across industry and academia.

Raffy Xie honored with 2026 Departmental Citation in Data Science Undergraduate Studies

May 28, 2026
UC Berkeley College of Computing, Data Science, and Society
Chemistry major Yuzi (Raffy) Xie discovered data science, and with it, the possibility to connect chemical processes to systems-level patterns across entire regions.
https://cdss.berkeley.edu/dsus/news/raffy_xie_departmental_citation

Three UC Berkeley faculty members elected to UK's Royal Society

May 27, 2026
By Robert Sanders | Berkeley News
A geophysicist, a chemist and a computer vision expert will become fellows of the 365-year-old science academy.
https://news.berkeley.edu/2026/05/27/three-uc-berkeley-faculty-members-elected-t…

Naomi Ginsberg named to the 2026 class of Brown Investigators

May 20, 2026
Press Release
The Brown Institute for Basic Sciences at Caltech has announced professor of chemistry and physics Naomi Ginsberg as one of the eight distinguished recipients of the 2026 National Brown Investigator Award.

Two UC Berkeley scholars elected to the American Philosophical Society

May 19, 2026
By Robert Sanders | Berkeley News
Historian Carla Hesse and chemist Jeffrey Long were named to the oldest scholarly society in the nation.
https://news.berkeley.edu/2026/05/13/two-uc-berkeley-scholars-elected-to-the-ame…

Karthik Shekhar receives Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholars award

May 4, 2026
By Veronica Bartell | College of Chemistry
Faculty who receive this award are within the first five years of their academic careers, have each created an outstanding independent body of scholarship, and are deeply committed to education.

The probability of greatness (and how to engineer it)

April 16, 2026
By Veronica Bartell | College of Chemistry
The CBE Department has an exceptionally high concentration of NAE members (42.9%), one of the highest densities for any single department in the world.