Professor Danielle Schmitt has been named a 2024 Rising Star by the American Chemical Society’s Biological, Medicinal, and Pharmaceutical Chemistry (Bio & Med Chem Au) journal. The annual award highlights emerging leaders in scientific research worldwide whose scientific contributions have a lasting impact on research in various fields of the natural sciences.
As a Rising Star, Schmitt was invited to contribute a manuscript to the 2024 Rising Stars virtual special issue of ACS Bio & Med Chem Au and is also featured in an accompanying editorial.
Schmitt’s article is titled “A Genetically Encoded Fluorescent Biosensor for Intracellular Measurement of Malonyl-CoA.”
Schmitt joined the UCLA faculty as an assistant professor of biochemistry in July 2022. Her awards and honors include a UCLA Hellman award (2024-25), a UCLA JCCC Strategic Plan Aligned Project Seed Grant (2024), and a $1.5 million New Innovator Award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) High-Risk, High-Reward Research program (2023).
Excerpt from ACS Bio & Med Chem Au Special Issue by Squire J. Booker:
ACS Bio & Med Chem Au: Introducing the 2024 Rising Stars in Biological, Medicinal, and Pharmaceutical Chemistry
ACS Bio & Med Chem Au is pleased to announce our 2024 Rising Stars in Biological, Medicinal, and Pharmaceutical Chemistry. The influence of chemistry on society is profound, impacting medicine and healthcare, agriculture, energy, and our day-to-day lives through myriad industrial processes. As the world embraces the 21st century, chemistry will be vital to meeting many current and emerging challenges, such as antibiotic resistance, viral infections, cancer, climate change, sustainable energy, and our food and water supply. Our 2024 rising stars have already committed to meeting many of those challenges. Two common themes among their contributions include lipid nanoparticles and other vehicles for drug delivery and sensors and other mechanisms for biological and medical diagnostics. Other themes include nucleic acid technology, developing new antibiotics and drugs to combat cancer, and the biosynthesis of natural products that act as antibiotic and/or anticancer agents. Their approaches include computation, chemical synthesis, chemical biology, structural studies by X-ray crystallography, and plenty of biochemistry. They hail from diverse countries across the globe, including the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Singapore, China, India, Switzerland, Japan, and Germany. Please learn about these future international leaders below. I am sure you will be as enthralled with their science as I am.
Danielle L. Schmitt
I am excited that our work developing new tools to study metabolic regulation will provide powerful new insights into cellular function. – Danielle L. Schmitt
Danielle L. Schmitt is an assistant professor at the University of California Los Angeles in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry. The Schmitt Lab is focused on developing new genetically encoded tools to study metabolic regulatory events in single cells with high spatiotemporal resolution. Before joining the faculty at UCLA, Danielle received a BS in Chemistry from Ball State University in 2012 and her PhD in Biochemistry at the University of Maryland Baltimore County in 2017, working with Dr. Songon An. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California San Diego, where she worked with Dr. Jin Zhang from 2018 to 2022. More information can be found about the Schmitt lab: https://dlschmitt.chem.ucla.edu.
