College of Chemistry

Omar Yaghi awarded 2024 Balzan Prize

September 9, 2024
Professor Omar M. Yaghi was awarded the 2024 Balzan Prize by the International Balzan Prize Foundation.

New AI Speeds Discovery in Synthetic Biology

October 8, 2020
Synthetic biology, like artificial intelligence (AI) machine learning, is a relatively modern field that applies emerging technologies to achieve innovation. Now scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) in California have merged the two fields by creating a machine learning algorithm for synthetic biology called ART (Automated Recommendation Tool),

Bruce H. Mahan, 1930 - 1982

February 18, 2021

Bruce Mahan posing on a tree log

Bruce Mahan was born in New Britain, Connecticut, in 1930. He attended Harvard University both as an undergraduate and as a graduate Ph.D. student. After completing his bachelor's degree in the chemistry department, he decided to carry out his doctoral studies with George Kistiakowsky in physical chemistry. Kistiakowsky had trained in gas phase photochemistry with Bodenstein in Berlin,...

With drop in LA’s vehicular aerosol pollution, plants emerge as major source

March 23, 2021
Restrictions on vehicle emissions have been so effective that in Los Angeles that the most concerning source of dangerous aerosol pollution may well be trees and other green plants.

Meet our faculty: Alexis T. Bell

August 10, 2020
Alexis T. Bell: A Career in Catalysis and University Administration at UC Berkeley

Black and white portrait of a man in front of blackboard.

Alexis T. Bell in UC Berkeley classroom, circa 1990.

Alexis T. Bell is the Dow Professor of Sustainable Chemistry in the Department of...

Bediako and Zuerch awarded grant to research control of 2D magnetic solids with ultrafast light waves

February 15, 2021

Portraits of two men

Kwabena Bediako and Michael Zuerch in the lab.

The College of Chemistry is pleased to announce that Assistant Professors of Chemistry Kwabena Bediako and Michael Zuerch have been awarded a $1M Science and Engineering research grant from...

UC Berkeley grad takes a closer look at nuclear forensics chemistry

January 14, 2021

In 2017, radiochemistry graduate student Mark Straub left the comfortable academic environs of UC Berkeley and moved to the middle of New Mexico, where he spent his summer working full time at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), the birthplace of the Manhattan Project. There, Mark teamed up with LANL scientists Jaqueline Kiplinger and Julianna Fessenden to study the impact and evolution of nuclear forensics, a process in which nuclear material can be examined to determine its source and history.

Mark’s interest...

A protein voyage into cells enabled by a short helical protein

April 16, 2021

Drawing of three pathways of endocytosis

Three common pathways of endocytosis in a cell to internalize outside substances. Figure credit: scientificanimations.com, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The Schepartz lab at UC Berkeley recently reported a way to efficiently deliver therapeutic proteins into live cells and...

Terry and Tori Rosen donate $25 million for new College of Chemistry building

October 16, 2019
University of California, Berkeley, alumnus Terry Rosen, the CEO of Arcus Biosciences, and his wife, Tori, have donated $25 million to the College of Chemistry for a building to be named in honor of Terry Rosen’s beloved mentor and former chemistry dean, Clayton Heathcock.

Big thanks to all our donors

March 12, 2018
Thanks to 173 donors worldwide, we received almost $1.7 million during last Thursday's 24 hour Big Give campaign.