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 […]

Researchers led by Professor Justin Caram and alumna Dr. Arundhati Deshmukh (Ph.D. ’21) have settled an almost 30 year old question about the nanoscale structure of self-assembled light-harvesting nanotubes. The nanotubes exhibit a brick-like arrangement of molecules that enables highly unusual photophysical properties, giving them extraordinary light harvesting capabilities on par with natural photosynthetic pigments. […]

Lithium-sulfur batteries have the potential to transform energy storage, with exceptional theoretical capacity and performance in combination with an element in abundant supply. But the intricate reaction mechanism, particularly during discharge, has been challenging to solve. UCLA researchers have identified the key pathways to a complex sulfur reduction reaction that leads to energy loss and […]

If computers used ripples in magnetic fields, called magnons, to encode and process information, the result would be devices with potential memory speed on the order of billionths of a second. UCLA researchers and partners caused two distinct types of magnons to interact so that output is not directly proportional to input — a crucial […]

A recent innovation in battery technology by Professor Richard Kaner’s group has been prominently featured on the cover of the prestigious journal Advanced Materials. The project, led by Kaner, along with the newly graduated Dr. Chenxiang Wang and researcher Dr. Maher El-Kady, introduces an innovative approach to enhance the efficiency and lifespan of zinc batteries. […]