Professor Hannah Shafaat has been named the recipient of the 2026 Early Career Award from the Society for Biological Inorganic Chemistry (SBIC). A leader in the bioinorganic chemistry community, she is being recognized for her important contributions to the field of nickel biochemistry, clear advances in artificial metalloenzymes, her pioneering studies using spectroscopy to investigate Mn/Fe oxidases, and her service to the community.
Shafaat will present an award lecture at the 2027 International Conference on Biological Inorganic Chemistry (ICBIC) at the University of York in the United Kingdom.
Shafaat earned her bachelor’s degree in chemistry from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 2006, where she performed research on spectroscopic endospore viability assays with Adrian Ponce (NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory) and Harry Gray. She earned her Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) in 2011, under the direction of Judy Kim, as an NSF Graduate Research Fellow and a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellow. After earning her Ph.D., Shafaat studied hydrogenase and oxidase enzymes and learned advanced EPR techniques as a Humboldt Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow working under Director Wolfgang Lubitz at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Energy Conversion.
Shafaat started her independent career in 2013 at Ohio State University, rising rapidly through the ranks before joining the UCLA Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry as a full professor in 2023. Her research program focuses on two major areas: (1) the development of protein-based models of nickel metalloenzymes and (2) the metalloenzymology of heterobimetallic oxidases. A particular strength of her work is the integration of protein redesign with advanced spectroscopic techniques to investigate the relationships among structure, function, and dynamics. This approach has revealed unique electronic structures that govern reactivity and has provided new insights into enzyme function. Her research has broader implications for the design of catalysts for sustainable energy conversion and for understanding the biochemistry underlying the origins of life.
Shafaat was awarded a 2018 Sloan Research Fellowship and the 2019 Ed Stiefel Young Investigator Award for research on Metals in Biology. She served as chair of the 2026 Metals in Biology Gordon Research Conference and serves on the editorial advisory boards of JACS, Inorganic Chemistry, and the Journal of Inorganic Biochemistry. She is also an associate editor at Chemical Science, the flagship journal of the Royal Society of Chemistry.
Penny Jennings, UCLA Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry, penjen@g.ucla.edu.
