Professor Thomas Mason has been named a Senior Member by National Academy of Inventors (NAI). Mason is part of the 124 of the foremost emerging academic inventors identified by NAI’s Member Institutions and welcomed to their 2024 class of Senior Members. NAI Senior Members are active faculty, scientists, and administrators from NAI Member Institutions who […]

Assistant Professor Victoria “Tori” P. Barber, a physical chemist, has been recognized for her research on germicidal UV light. Her work has been highlighted in a video on Vox.com and an article from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) news. Barber’s interest in UV light stems from her work as a postdoctoral researcher at MIT. […]

Professor Heather Maynard, UCLA’s Dr. Myung Ki Hong Endowed Chair in Polymer Science, has been selected as one of the three recipients of the 2024 Herman F. Mark Scholar Awards from the Polymer Chemistry Division of the ACS. The award includes a plaque and an honorarium of $1,500. The Mark Scholars will be honored at […]

A UCLA research team led by Professor Prineha Narang, and comprised of multiple California NanoSystems Institute members, has been awarded a $650,000 National Science Foundation Convergence Accelerator Phase 1 Award for the project entitled “Portable Quantum-enhanced Sensing and Species Identification of Bioaerosols.” From California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI) News (by Nicole Wilkins): A UCLA research team led by […]

A generous donation by Distinguished Professor of Biochemistry Juli Feigon has established an annual UCLA Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry Helping Hands Award.   The Juli Feigon Helping Hands Award is an annual award for postdoctoral fellows, research staff, and graduate students who are primary caregivers for dependent children or other family members, to provide extra time […]

Professor Ken Houk’s group and the Rudi Fasan group at the University of Texas Dallas collaborated to pioneer biocatalytic synthetic pathways for 4-6 membered lactams, key structural elements in many biologically active compounds such as the antibiotic Penicillin and the Covid-19 drug Paxlovid.  The team’s paper in Nature Catalysis was recently highlighted in Chemical & […]

Lisa Boatner, a fourth-year graduate student in the Backus/Houk research groups, has been awarded the prestigious Females in Mass Spectrometry (FeMS) 2023 Rising Star in Computational Mass Spectrometry Award. FeMS is a community-led initiative to create a network of support for women in the field of mass spectrometry. Before joining the graduate program, Boatner earned […]

The UCLA Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry has partnered with the West Coast University (WCU) School of Pharmacy (SOP) to create a PharmD Linkage Program that is designed specifically for UCLA chemistry and biochemistry students or alumni who are interested in obtaining their PharmD degree at WCU.  WCU is among  the first pharmacy schools in […]