We are sad to report that Adela Roberts, widow of UCLA biochemistry professor emeritus Roberts Smith, passed away on December 31, 2021. In May, 2022 Adela’s family had a small gathering up on Vancouver Island to spread both her and Bob’s ashes around their garden at the house they both loved so much. Bob passed […]

Samantha (Sammy) Mensah – talented scientist, passionate activist, co-founder of BlackInChem, and UCLA Bruin – passed away on February 22, 2023. Sammy was a 6th-year chemistry graduate student in the groups of Professors Paul Weiss and Anne Andrews where she studied biosensors that detect neurotransmitters and other chemical biomarkers. She received her bachelor’s degree in […]

On February 6, 2023, alumnus Dr. Marco Messina (Ph.D. ’19 Maynard/Spokoyny groups), currently a postdoc at the University of California, Berkeley, was presented with the 2023 Norma Stoddart Prize for Academic Excellence and Outstanding Citizenship. Nobel Laureate and UCLA Emeritus Professor of Chemistry Sir Fraser Stoddart visited UCLA to present the prize and to give […]

Professor Justin Caram is among 126 early-career researchers receiving the 2023 Sloan Research Fellowships from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The Sloan Research Fellowships are extraordinarily competitive awards involving nominations for most of the very best young scientists from the United States and Canada.  According to the foundation, the awards “honor extraordinary U.S. and Canadian […]

Professor Daniel G. Nocera (Harvard), a world-renowned chemist known for revolutionizing chemical approaches to energy, visited UCLA on January 26, 2023, to give the Winter 2023 Distinguished Lecture.  Over 200 faculty, students, and researchers attended Nocera’s lecture titled “Fuel, Food, and Vitamins from Thin Air, Water and Sunlight”, which was held in the department’s new […]

We are saddened to report that Emeritus Professor E. Russell Hardwick passed away on January 12, 2023, at the age of 100. Professor Hardwick studied Business Administration at UCLA and was a member of the ROTC. Immediately after graduating in 1943, he went on active duty as an officer; he saw action and was awarded […]

A collaborative research team led by Professor Xiangfeng Duan’s group and Professor Anastassia N. Alexandrova’s group in the UCLA Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry, and Professor Yu Huang’s group in the UCLA Department of Materials Science and Engineering, has elucidated the elusive role of alkali metal cations in regulating alkaline hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) on […]

Professor Yi Tang has been selected as a 2022 fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in recognition of his distinguished contribution to the fields of biochemistry and chemical biology, particularly for improving fundamental understanding of the chemical logic and enzymology in the biosynthesis of natural products. Tang is currently the […]