
The UCLA Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry would like to welcome Professors Prineha Narang, Matthew Nava, and Danielle Schmitt to our department! All three faculty members formally started their appointments at UCLA on July 1, 2022.
Brief biographies of our new faculty are below. Read an in-depth article about Professor Prineha Narang here and please watch for in-depth profile articles of Professor Matthew Nava and Professor Danielle Schmitt in the near future.
Professor Prineha Narang
Before joining the UCLA physical chemistry faculty as the Howard Reiss Development Chair, Professor Prineha Narang was an Assistant Professor at the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University. She will be joined at UCLA by her interdisciplinary group, which she founded at Harvard. Narang received her M.S. and Ph.D. in Applied Physics from the California Institute of Technology and was an Environmental Fellow at HUCE, and worked as a research scholar in condensed matter theory in the Department of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In addition to her academic accomplishments, Narang is the Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Aliro, a quantum network platform company she co-founded in 2019. Read more about Narang’s many accomplishments here.
Professor Matthew Nava
Professor Matthew Nava joins our inorganic faculty as an Assistant Professor. A Southern California native, Nava received a BS/MS from the University of California, Riverside, working under Professor Chris Reed, and his Ph.D. in chemistry in 2017 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with Professor Christopher Cummins. Before joining the UCLA faculty, Nava was a postdoctoral fellow in Professor Daniel G. Nocera’s group in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard.
Professor Danielle Schmitt
Professor Danielle Schmitt joins our biochemistry faculty as an Assistant Professor. She received a bachelor’s degree in chemistry-biochemistry from Ball State University, where she performed undergraduate research with Professor Bruce Storhoff as a Lewis Stokes Alliances for Minority Participation scholar. She performed her doctoral dissertation work with Professor Songon An in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at University of Maryland Baltimore County, and her postdoctoral training with Professor Jin Zhang in the Pharmacology Department at University of California, San Diego. Visit the Schmitt group website here.
Penny Jennings, UCLA Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry, penny@chem.ucla.edu.