College of Chemistry

Christopher Chang, Professor of Chemistry and Molecular and Cell Biology at UC Berkeley has been awarded the Raymond and Beverly Sackler International Prize in Chemistry from Tel Aviv University. The prize recognizes distinguished scientists under age 45 who have made outstanding and fundamental contributions in their fields. Chang’s research interests include inorganic, organic, and biological chemistry. His research laboratory pursues new concepts in sensing and catalysis to study metals in biology and energy.

The new edition of "Chemical Engineering Design and Analysis" written by T. Michael Duncan, Cornell University, New York and Jeffrey A. Reimer, University of California, Berkeley will be available in February from Cambridge University Press. "Chemical Engineering Design and Analysis" puts design at the center of introducing students to the course in mass and energy balances in chemical engineering. Employers and accreditations increasingly stress the importance of design in the engineering curriculum, and design-driven analysis will motivate students to dig deeply into the key concepts of the field.

It was announced today that the 2019 Wolf Prize for Chemistry has been awarded to professors John F. Hartwig from University of California at Berkeley and Stephen L. Buchwald from MIT, for the development of efficient transition-metal catalysts that have revolutionized drug manufacturing, leading to breakthrough in molecule and synthetics design.

Zinc-zinc bonds are rare in chemistry. So are linear four-metal compounds. Nevertheless, Trevor D. Lohrey, a member of John Arnold’s group at the University of California, Berkeley, has made the first molecule with a Re-Zn-Zn-Re core. Lohrey used a rhenium(I) salt to reduce ZnCl2 and make a zinc cation to which anionic rhenium compounds coordinated.