PhD student Santiago Vargas (Alexandrova group) is first UCLA student in nearly 20 years to receive a prestigious DOE Computational Science Graduate Fellowship. A first-year theoretical/computational chemistry graduate student in Professor Anastassia Alexandrova’s group, Santiago is conducting research on molecular qubits. His hope is to work on bridging computational chemistry with cutting-edge machine learning and […]

The department’s first Teacher-Scholar, Sharon Neufeldt, now an assistant professor at Montana State University, wins a prestigious 2020 Cottrell Scholar Award. Neufeldt is one of 25 educators in the 2020 class of Cottrell Scholars, an award honoring both academic leadership and innovative research in the physical sciences. The $100,000 award will help fund Neufeldt’s research on […]

Vice Chair of Undergraduate Education Professor Anastassia Alexandrova offers some ideas of how our undergraduate students can stay productive at home.  A chemistry undergraduate student recently asked the department for suggestions of what she can do to keep learning while sheltering at home. Here some great ideas from Professor Alexandrova: Throw your efforts into learning […]

Professor Jiaxing Huang (PhD ’04, Kaner group) has received funding to develop a new self-sanitizing medical face mask that deactivates viruses on contact. A professor of materials science in Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering, Huang received his Ph.D. in Chemistry from UCLA in 2004 under the direction of Professor Richard Kaner.  “Professor Huang’s exciting research into self-sanitizing […]

JoAnne Stubbe’s 2020 Priestly Medal address “The road less traveled—for love of detection, discovery, and all things radical in nature” is now online. Read Stubbe’s address on the Chemical & Engineering News website here.  The Novartis Professor of Chemistry and Biology, emerita, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Stubbe, was awarded the medal in […]

Professor Ken Houk’s group joins with the Scott Denmark group at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign to explain the autocatalytic Soai reaction. The Soai reaction shown below was discovered in the 1990s and has been studied by many groups since then. It is the paradigm of an asymmetric autocatalytic reaction; a tiny amount of chiral catalyst […]

On March 1, 2020, we celebrated the official installation of Professor Michael Jung as the UC Presidential Chair in Medicinal Chemistry. An intimate gathering of close supporters, donors, faculty, alumni, and friends gathered for a reception and dinner at Shutters on the Beach in Santa Monica. UCLA Chancellor Gene Block and Dean of Physical Sciences […]

We are sad to report that Lyda Boyer, widow of Nobel Laureate Emeritus Professor Paul Boyer, passed away on Monday March 9, just short of her 101st birthday. When UCLA biochemistry professor and Nobel Laureate Dr. Paul D. Boyer died in June 2018, the Boyers had been married nearly 79 years. Lyda will be cremated and […]