Two faculty-graduate student teams led by Professors Soumitra Athavale and Victoria Barber have received funding through a new $1.4 million grant from the W.M. Keck Foundation.
Professor Soumitra Athavale, who holds the John D. and Edith M. Roberts Term Professorship in Organic Chemistry, and chemistry graduate student Justin Manoff will pursue a project titled “New-to-Nature Biocatalysis for Sustainable Hydrogenation,” which focuses on advancing green chemistry approaches that contribute to a cleaner environment.
Professor Victoria “Tori” Barber, who holds the John McTague Career Development Chair, and graduate student Cooper Crabtree will pursue a project titled “Rapid Acceleration Toward a Total Mechanistic Explanation for Atmospheric Oxidation” to better understand how pollutants such as smog form in the atmosphere.
Athavale and Barber both joined the UCLA faculty in July 2023.
From UCLA Newsroom (by Mary Daily and Jonathan Riggs):
A bridge to scientific discovery: UCLA receives $1.4 million from W.M. Keck Foundation
Seven supported research projects pair early-career faculty and doctoral students
Key takeaways
- UCLA has received $1.4 million from the W.M. Keck Foundation to help early-career faculty continue their work amid growing uncertainty about federal research funding.
- With the grant funding, seven faculty–student teams will pursue projects ranging from brain health and climate change to green chemistry and space science.
- The grant extends a more than 40-year partnership between UCLA and the Keck Foundation, which has invested over $60 million in campus research, healthcare and education initiatives.
Early-career faculty are poised to make transformative discoveries, forge innovative approaches and move all fields forward — but they’re also vulnerable to increasingly uncertain federal research funding, especially in medicine and the sciences.
To shore up the scientific pipeline and ensure that these faculty have the resources to continue their work regardless of breaks in traditional funding, the W.M. Keck Foundation has given UCLA a $1.4 million grant to support seven projects that pair newly named Keck Scholars (assistant or associate professors) with Keck Fellows (doctoral students) in critical and emerging areas of research.
“We deeply appreciate and highly value our long relationship with the Keck Foundation,” said UCLA Chancellor Julio Frenk. “This recent gift is especially meaningful because it reflects confidence in our mission, trust in our institution and a shared commitment to the future we are building. Together, we will advance innovation and impact for generations to come.”
This one-time bridge funding continues UCLA’s more than 40-year relationship with the Keck Foundation, which has provided the university over $60 million to support science, faculty research, student training and other campus priorities.
The supported projects reflect UCLA’s strength in early-stage research with long-term potential for human health, climate science, sustainable chemistry and advanced materials, and include:
UCLA College Division of Physical Sciences
New-to-Nature Biocatalysis for Sustainable Hydrogenation focuses on providing a cleaner environment through green chemistry.
- Keck Scholar: Soumitra Athavale, assistant professor of chemistry and biochemistry, John D. and Edith M. Roberts Term Professor of Organic Chemistry
- Keck Fellow: Justin Manoff, doctoral student in chemistry
Rapid Acceleration Toward a Total Mechanistic Explanation for Atmospheric Oxidation explores exactly how pollutants like smog form in the atmosphere.
- Keck Scholar: Victoria Barber, assistant professor of chemistry and biochemistry, John McTague Career Development Chair
- Keck Fellow: Cooper Crabtree, doctoral student in chemistry
Pacemaker of Global Climate Change: Unraveling the Role of the Southern Ocean seeks to better understand the Southern Ocean’s role in the global climate system and its remote impacts on other regions of the Earth, helping to improve predictions of near-future climate change.
- Keck Scholar: Yue Dong, assistant professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences
- Keck Fellow: Emma Dawson, doctoral student in atmospheric and oceanic sciences
Unveiling Jupiter’s Dusty Ring System Through Neural Network Analysis of Juno Plasma Wave Data utilizes artificial intelligence to map the structure of Jupiter’s rings and reveal the dynamical processes that shape them.
- Keck Scholar: Hao Cao, assistant professor of Earth, planetary and space sciences
- Keck Fellow: Wenyu Zhang, doctoral student in Earth, planetary and space sciences
UCLA College Division of Social Sciences
Do Tree Hydraulics Control Amazon Forest Drought Resilience? seeks to develop an AI method to uncover how trees draw water from soil to leaves, enabling researchers to predict the future of the Amazon rainforest.
- Keck Scholar: Yue Li, assistant professor of geography
- Keck Fellow: Yiyao Li, doctoral student in geography
UCLA Samueli School of Engineering
Architecting Liquid Microstructures: A New Paradigm for Programmable Liquids explores the transformation of transforming liquids from simple solvents into high-tech, “tunable” materials.
- Keck Scholar: Yuzhang Li, associate professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering
- Keck Fellow: Huida Lyu, doctoral student in chemical and biomolecular engineering
David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA
Proteomics in Fixed Tissue: Revealing Microglial Cell Surface and Lysosomal Proteomes and Equipping the Field for Protein-Level Discovery in Archived Tissues aims to discover which protein networks help keep the brain sharp and which lead to decline.
- Keck Scholar: Lindsay De Biase, associate professor of physiology and neurobiology
- Keck Fellow: Adrian Escobar Porcel, doctoral student in neuroscience
These Keck-supported projects exemplify the complex, critical nature of questions that UCLA scholars and their students tackle every day, on campus and beyond, and the topics reflect UCLA’s ability to pursue fundamental questions with potential long-term benefits for people, communities and the planet.
“The world depends on major research universities such as UCLA to find solutions that will improve quality of life for us all,” said Roger Wakimoto, UCLA vice chancellor for research, innovation and creative activities. “Research is a cornerstone of UCLA, and generous partners such as the Keck Foundation enable us to continue the critical inquiry for which we are widely known.”
