Chemical Biology

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...

Discovery could lead to new fungicides to protect rice crops

February 13, 2023

healthy rice field

Blast disease destroys between 10% and 35% of the world’s rice harvest each year. A new discovery could lead to fungicides that block the pathogen, Magnaporthe oryzae, from entering the leaves. This photo of a healthy rice field was taken in Chengdu, China, in 2019. (Photo credit: Nicholas Talbot)

A fungus that plagues rice crops worldwide gains entry to plant cells in a way that leaves...

Ziyang Zhang receives Searle Scholars award

May 23, 2024
Ziyang Zhang has been named as one of the 2024 Searle Scholars.

Markita Landry receives 2018 DARPA Young Faculty Award

July 18, 2018
Assistant Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Markita Landry has been awarded a prestigious two-year Department Of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Young Faculty Award for her project Brain Chemical Signaling: A New Input Signal for Brain-Computer Interfaces.

Summer intern Arjun Garapaty designs microfluidic device

September 9, 2022

Arjun Garapaty at MRI Global

Arjun Garapaty during his summer internship at MRIGlobal. Photo courtesy of MRIGlobal.

Arjun Garapaty thinks big. It wasn’t that long ago that he earned a perfect score on his ACT test… as a sophomore in high school. Now a sophomore at University of California,...