Chemical Biology

Ziyang Zhang receives NIH Director's New Innovator Award

October 8, 2024
Ziyang Zhang has been awarded the NIH Director's New Innovator Award for exceptionally creative early career scientists proposing innovative, high-impact projects.

Chemistry Nobelist Carolyn Bertozzi’s years at UC Berkeley

October 5, 2022

Professor Bertozzi standing at whiteboard.

Carolyn Bertozzi as a young professor at UC Berkeley. (Photo: courtesy of College of Chemistry)

Carolyn Bertozzi, a professor at Stanford University who today shared the 2022 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, spent her formative and most creative years at UC Berkeley.

After graduating from Harvard University in 1988, she earned her Ph.D. in chemistry...

Rethinking the Tree of Life with new tools

January 17, 2022

Morning Glory Pool, Yellowstone National Park

Finding Archaea: Archaeans inhabit some of the most extreme environments on Earth. Woese and Fox’s genetic analysis led them to redraw the Tree of Life, incorporating this third domain. (Photo: Morning Glory Pool, Yellowstone National Park; Jim Peaco; March 2015; Catalog #20008d.)

Professor Sung-Hou Kim and his colleagues...

Seeing in super-resolution

January 20, 2023

Portrait of Ke Xu in the lab. (Photo by Elena Zhukova)

Ke Xu, Associate Professor of Chemistry, is a 2021 Heising-Simons Faculty Fellow. (Photo by Elena Zhukova)

What do the smallest building blocks of life look like? How do molecules dance and dart and drift through cells, fold and fuse and form the machinery of living things? For...

Berkeley startup aims to be a game changer in autoimmune disease therapy

July 22, 2021

 Geo Guillen, Marco Lobba, Matthew Francis
UC Berkeley business and chemistry alumni Geo Guillen, left, and Marco Lobba, middle, launched Catena Biosciences with Berkeley chemistry professor Matthew Francis. The trio credit Berkeley’s entrepreneurship ecosystem for their company’s rapid rise. (Photo courtesy of Catena Biosciences)

Marco Lobba was five years into his UC Berkeley chemistry Ph.D. program...

Retooling the translation machine could expand the chemical repertoire of cells

June 16, 2023

How proteins are made

Ribosomes (blue, upper left) are nanomachines that read mRNA (coming in from left) to assemble a chain of amino acids (magenta balls) that folds into a compact 3D protein (lower right, pink). (Graphic adapted from the National Science Foundation (NSF) image)

Synthetic biologists have become increasingly creative in engineering yeast or bacteria to churn out...

Meet our faculty: John Hartwig

November 15, 2019

John Hartwig

Image: © Peter Strain @ Début Art

The catalysis innovator on the thrills of heading to the mountains and having a reaction named after him.

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-...

Department of Chemistry welcomes new faculty

May 10, 2019

Alanna Schepartz and Michael Zuerch join the department of chemistry

Matthew Francis, Chair of the Department of Chemistry at UC Berkeley, announces the addition of two new faculty members who will join the College in July. Alanna Schepartz joins the faculty as the T. Z. and Irmgard Chu Distinguished Chair in Chemistry; Michael Zuerch joins the faculty as an Assistant Professor of Physical Chemistry.

Introducing our new faculty members and their lab groups

September 3, 2019

Fall semester at UC Berkeley brings cool air, sunny skies and hordes of nervous incoming first-year undergrads to the campus. At the College of Chemistry, the beginning of the semester also triggers a sudden epidemic of goofy handmade posters that seem to multiply and cover every available vertical surface.

Lab promotional posters for UC Berkeley College of Chemistry

Recruiting posters for...

Alumna Spotlight with Cheri Ackerman of Concerto Biosciences

October 12, 2021

Cheri Ackerman, alumna

Photo: courtesy of Concerto Biosciences.

Cheri Ackerman (Ph.D. '17, ChemBio) is a co-founder & CEO @ Concerto Biosciences, an MIT/Harvard spinout that develops microbial “ensembles” as revolutionary new disease treatments. To discover ensembles, Concerto uses a novel screening...