College of Chemistry

Meet alumna Yao Yue Lao

February 19, 2020
aerospace.org/

Yao Yue Lao

In honor of Engineers Week, Aerospace Corporation is spotlighting a few of our many great engineers and getting a peek at the exciting projects that they’re focused on. Find out about Yao (B.S. '08, Chem) wound up at the Aerospace Corporation doing exciting work in photovoltaic characterization and solar array modeling.

David Altman: Alumnus and Bay Area rocket scientist turns 100

February 12, 2020
Jerimiah Oetting | The Mercury News

David Altman

On the brink of his 100th trip around the sun, the secret to David Altman’s (Ph.D. '43, Chem) long and illustrious life isn’t rocket science. At least, not entirely. It’s a strategy that seems to have worked well for Altman, who will officially become a centenarian on Thursday. His dizzying number of accomplishments in rocket science — papers written, patents held, awards won — seem to indicate that not a moment was wasted in all of his one hundred years.

11 Catalysis Chemistry Pioneers Every Researcher Should Know About

February 3, 2020
Mia Fields-Hall | ACS Axial

Catalysis Pioneers

Alexis Bell, The Dow Professor of Sustainable Chemistry at Berkeley and Frances Arnold, Linus Pauling Professor of Chemical Engineering, Bioengineering and Biochemistry, and an alumna of the College were both cited on the list of catalysis pioneers listed in the ACS publication ACS Axial.

Carolyn Bertozzi’s glycorevolution

February 3, 2020
Lisa M. Jarvis | C&EN

Carolyn Bertozzi’

Carolyn Bertozzi, the glycoscience evangelist has spent her career illuminating the importance of the sugar structures coating our cells. As she turns from building biological tools to building biotech companies, will she see a new wave of converts?

The Element Named After Berkeley

September 17, 2019
By Barry Bergman | California Magazine

berkelium

Glenn Seaborg was born too late to have spawned Cal’s spirit cry. It’s coincidence, surely, that his name is an anagram for “Go Bears!” And, although he was definitely a Bears fan and was Chancellor when Cal last made it to the Rose Bowl in 1959, he was never in Oski’s league as a campus celebrity. While others led rallies, he had to settle for spearheading decades of trailblazing nuclear science, endowing UC Berkeley with bragging rights to the discovery of a record 16 new elements. Now, though, the 1951 Nobelist is making a bid to play in the social media space.

Meet CRISPR: Humanity’s shiny new tool

December 31, 2019
Taylor Beck | California Magazine

CRISPR Cas9

One of biology’s wilder facts is that we’re all family. You and me, sure, but also me and a mushroom. Triceratops shared genes with you. So does the virus that makes you cough, and a rosebush. Bacteria left us on the tree of life around 2.7 billion years ago, but the wet world they came from is still ours: One code runs all of life. The same proteins that imprint memories in your neurons, for example, do so in octopi, ravens, and sea slugs. This genetic conservation means tricks from one species can be hijacked. If you stick a jellyfish gene in a monkey, it’ll glow green.

Professor David Schaffer elected to AAAS

November 26, 2019
Robert Saunders | UC Berkeley

David Schaffer

Professor David Schaffer joins four other Berkeley faculty members who have been named fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), an honor bestowed upon the society’s members by their peers. Schaffer has been elected “for pioneering contributions to biomolecular engineering, with particular attention to directed evolution to create viruses for the efficient, targeted and safe delivery of gene medicines.”

Freeze Frame: Scientists capture atomic-scale snapshots of artificial proteins

December 5, 2019
by Theresa Duque | Lawrence Berkeley Lab

Nitash Balsara

Protein-like molecules called “polypeptoids” (or “peptoids,” for short) have great promise as precision building blocks for creating a variety of designer nanomaterials, like flexible nanosheets – ultrathin, atomic-scale 2D materials. They could advance a number of applications – such as synthetic, disease-specific antibodies and self-repairing membranes or tissue – at a low cost.Scientists at Berkeley Lab are the first to use cryogenic electron microscopy (cryo-EM) to image atomic changes in artificial proteins known as “peptoids.” Their findings have implications for the synthesis of soft, 2D materials for a wide variety of applications.

The first U.S. trials in people put CRISPR to the test in 2019

December 30, 2019
Tina Hesman Saey | Sciencenews.com

first US CRISPR trials

When it was unveiled in 2012, people had great hopes that the gene editor CRISPR/Cas9 could treat or even cure hundreds to thousands of genetic diseases. This year, researchers in the United States began testing the gene editor in people, a crucial first step in determining whether the technology can fulfill its medical promise.

The histories hidden in the periodic table

December 31, 2019
By Neima Jahromi | New Yorker

periodic table

The story of the fifteenth element began in Hamburg, in 1669. The unsuccessful glassblower and alchemist Hennig Brandt was trying to find the philosopher’s stone, a mythical substance that could turn base metals into gold. Instead, he distilled something new. It was foamy and, depending on the preparation, yellow or black. He called it “cold fire,” because it glowed in the dark. Interested parties took a look; some felt that they were in the presence of a miracle. “If anyone had rubbed himself all over with it,” one observer noted, “his whole figure would have shone, as once did that of Moses when he came down from Mt. Sinai.”