The UCLA Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry has appointed Professor Kalli Kappel as the Linda and Fred Wudl Term Chair, effective retroactively to July 1, 2025.
Established in 2005, the Linda and Fred Wudl Term Chair supports exceptional faculty in UCLA’s Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry. By enabling the department to appoint either a junior or senior faculty member to the chair, the Wudls provided the department with the maximum flexibility in attracting outstanding scholars at any stage of their careers for a five-year term.
Professor Kalli Kappel joined the UCLA faculty in July 2025. Her group’s research focuses on understanding how RNA and protein sequences encode molecular and cellular function. To do this, her lab takes an integrated experimental and computational approach. They develop high-throughput experiments to map multiscale structures — from molecular conformations, to formation of higher-order assemblies, to subcellular localization — and function for large libraries of protein and RNA sequences, focusing especially on measuring these relationships in human cells. They then use machine learning and computational biophysical approaches to learn and extrapolate from their large-scale data. Their goal is to develop predictive sequence-organization-function models, and to harness these models to gain novel biological insights, to understand how mutations cause disease, and to design functional protein and RNA sequences.
Kappel received her B.S. in Physics from the University of California, San Diego, where she worked with Professor Andrew McCammon. She received her Ph.D. in Biophysics from Stanford University with Professor Rhiju Das. Kappel then did her postdoctoral training at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard with Professor Aviv Regev and Professor Feng Zhang.
ABOUT LINDA AND FRED WUDL
The Wudls both attended UCLA (where they met) and have since contributed a great deal to the sciences.
Dr. Linda Wudl (née Raimondo) was born and raised in Southern California and graduated from UCLA with a B.S. in microbiology in 1967. She received her M.S. from Harvard in 1969 and her Ph.D. in genetics from SUNY Buffalo in 1972. She subsequently joined Amgen, where she rose to become Vice President of Quality. She retired in 2007.
Professor Fred Wudl was born in Cochabamba, Bolivia, and emigrated to the United States in 1958. He received B.S. and Ph.D. degrees from UCLA in 1964 and 1967, respectively, then did his postdoctoral research at Harvard before joining the faculty at SUNY Buffalo. He moved to AT&T Bell Laboratories in 1972 and joined the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) faculty in 1982. He moved to UCLA as the Cortaulds Professor of Chemistry in 1997, and returned to UCSB in 2006. He is widely known for his research on organic conductors and superconductors, and his interest in electronically conducting polymers resulted in the discovery of the first transparent organic conductor and the first self-doped polymers. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences.
Penny Jennings, UCLA Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry, penjen@g.ucla.edu.
