College of Chemistry

This year's grand prize in campus lab safety was awarded to the Arnold lab group in Chemistry, headed by Professor of Chemistry and Undergraduate Dean John Arnold. Lab safety coordinators and chemistry graduate students Michael Boreen and Trevor Lohrey were also aknowledged and on hand to accept the award for the group in February."

In a press release issued in January by the Wolf Foundation in Israel, it was announced that Professors John Hartwig and Stephen Buchwald (MIT) had been jointly awarded the 2019 Wolf Prize in Chemistry for independently harnessing cross coupling for the making of carbon-heteroatom bonds. The Foundation noted, “These bonds and especially the carbon-nitrogen bonds are immensely important, because such bonds constitute a very basis of medicinal chemistry."

Tiny, easy-to-produce particles, called quantum dots, may soon take the place of more expensive single crystal semiconductors in advanced electronics found in solar panels, camera sensors and medical imaging tools. Although quantum dots have begun to break into the consumer market – in the form of quantum dot TVs – they have been hampered by long-standing uncertainties about their quality. Now, a new measurement technique developed by researchers at Stanford University and UC Berkeley may finally dissolve those doubts.

UC Berkeley researchers, led by Professor of Chemistry Michelle Chang, have discovered a biosynthetic pathway that makes amino acids containing terminal alkynes. Because such functional groups are rare in natural products, they provide a handle for chemistry that’s not generally found in biological organisms. For example, chemists could use such groups to attach fluorescent dyes to proteins via click chemistry.