College of Chemistry

Robin Padilla earned his PhD in chemistry in 2010. He worked as a postdoc and scientific editor before assuming his current role as a product manager with Springer Nature. In this position, he applies his analytical skills to developing databases that help researchers to find the information they need faster.

Hydrogen-powered vehicles emit only water vapor from their tailpipes, offering a cleaner alternative to fossil-fuel-based transportation. But for hydrogen cars to become mainstream, scientists need to develop more efficient hydrogen-storage systems. Now, a group of scientists reporting in ACS' Chemistry of Materials have used metal–organic frameworks (MOFs) to set a new record for hydrogen storage capacity under normal operating conditions.

In 2018, the Nobel Prize for chemistry went to one British and two American scientists. Professor Frances Arnold is an American chemical engineer who was awarded for her pioneering work on the “directed evolution of enzymes.” In this edition of "The Interview", Fair Observer talks to Arnold about her scholarly work, her path to success and her life after being awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

New research from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has been published in "Chemistry: a Europena Journal" about two elements discovered at Berkeley: Berkelium and Californium. Researchers show that berkelium and californium, two elements in the actinide series (elements 89 to 103), have a surprisingly stable +5 oxidation state.