Short Biography
Dr. Chau Ngo (2023-2024 Donald J. Cram Teacher-Scholar, the Backus group) excitedly joined our Teacher-Scholar Instructional faculty in July 2023. She will be teaching the General and Organic Chemistry Laboratory I & II (CHEM 14BL/ 14CL) in the Winter and Spring quarters (2024). As a teacher, Chau’s teaching philosophy is to cultivate culturally responsive and evidence-based teaching to develop an inclusive and student-centered learning environment. Prior to joining the UCLA Department of Chemistry of Biochemistry, Chau received her B.S. and M.S. in Chemistry from the University of California, San Diego. Chau then pursued her doctoral study in Chemistry at the University of Southern California (USC) in the laboratory of Professor Chao Zhang. Working in multidisciplinary research at the interface of organic chemistry, medicinal chemistry, and chemical biology, Chau’s doctoral research mainly focused on the development of potent and selective small-molecule covalent inhibitors against numerous therapeutic proteins for the treatment of human diseases, including COVID-19 and autoimmune diseases. In Fall 2022, Chau received the prestigious USC Burg Teaching Fellowship Award and served as an Assistant Lecturer for the first-semester Organic Chemistry course at USC. As part of her Teacher-Scholar position in the UCLA Chemistry & Biochemistry department, Chau also conducts chemical biology research in Professor Keriann Backus’s group. Her research interests in the Backus lab center around the discovery of new small molecules as chemical tools to study ligandable proteomes and the development of chemoproteogenomics platform for uncovering the full therapeutic potential of proteome and immunopeptidome of interest.