Garrell, Robin L.

Robin L. Garrell was born in Detroit, Michigan. She received her B.S. Degree in Biochemistry with Honors and Distinction from Cornell University in 1978, where she worked with Stuart J. Edelstein to elucidate the structure of sickle cell hemoglobin fibers. She earned her M.S. and Ph.D. in Macromolecular Science and Engineering from the University of Michigan in 1984. Working with Samuel Krimm, she developed surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy to probe adsorption at liquid-metal interfaces.

She was an Assistant Professor on the faculty of the University of Pittsburgh until 1991, when she joined the faculty of the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is a member of the UCLA Biomedical Engineering faculty and the California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI). She has served on the Advisory Boards of C&EN, Applied Spectroscopy and other journals. She served on the Coblentz Society Board of Governors (1994-98) and was President of the Society for Applied Spectroscopy in 1999. She is currently a member of the NIH Enabling Bioanalytical and Imaging Technologies Study Section. Garrell was Chair of the Faculty Executive Committee of the UCLA College (2003-07) and Chair of the UCLA Academic Senate in 2009-10. Her educational leadership roles include serving as Associate Director of the NASA Center for Cell-Mimetic Space Exploration, as member of the Executive Board of the NIH Chemistry-Biology Interface Training Program, and as PI/Director of the NSF Nanosystems Chemistry and Engineering Research Experiences for Undergraduates program.

Since 2006, she has been the PI/Director of the NSF Integrated Graduate Education and Research Training (IGERT) Materials Creation Training Program at UCLA. Garrell’s UCLA honors include the Herbert Newby McCoy Award for Outstanding Research in Chemistry at UCLA (1995), the Hanson-Dow Award for Teaching Excellence in Chemistry (1997), the UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award (2003), and the Gold Shield Faculty Prize (2009). She is the recipient of the National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award (1985), Iota Sigma Pi Agnes Fay Morgan Award (1996), Gold Medal Award in the 2007 Masscal Pioneering Micro and Thermal Analysis Technology Competition, and the Benedetti-Pichler Award from the American Microchemical Society (2007).

She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Society for Applied Spectroscopy.