The UCLA Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry is excited to announce that five talented researchers and educators will be joining the department in the coming months. Please join us in welcoming them to the department! Detailed profiles of each new faculty member will be shared in the future.
Dr. Dory DeWeese, a recent graduate from the Solomon group at Stanford University, will join the department as an Assistant Teaching Professor on November 1, 2024. At UCLA, research in the DeWeese group will focus on expanding equitable chemical education by developing new equitable education practices to enhance students’ feeling of belonging and success in chemistry and re-designing large enrollment courses to tailor instruction to individual needs and knowledge levels of students. DeWeese will collaborate with UCLA faculty, students, and academic centers to make chemistry content and classrooms inclusive spaces for historically marginalized students and support the success of all students.
Dr. Thomas Fay, currently a postdoctoral researcher at Aix-Marseille Université working with Miquel Huix-Rotllant and Nicolas Ferré, will join the department as an assistant professor on July 1, 2025. At UCLA, research in the Fay group will focus on the development of theory and computational tools to understand light-induced processes in molecules and materials. The research group will work on developing tools to probe the roles of electron and energy transfer in biological and artificial photosynthetic systems, as well as to study more general problems in condensed phase photochemistry. Another interest of the group will be developing theories for the relationship between chirality and electron spin, and how this can be harnessed for applications ranging from quantum information science to enantioselective catalysis. [X/Twitter: @TomPFay]
Dr. Kalli Kappel, currently an HHMI Hanna Gray Fellow at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, will join the department as an assistant professor on July 1, 2025. At UCLA, the Kappel Lab will work on developing predictive sequence-structure-function models of RNA, proteins, and their interactions by combining high-throughput experiments, machine learning, and computational biophysical methods. Research in the lab will focus especially on understanding how structure within human cells, at multiple length scales – from molecular conformations, to formation of higher-order assemblies, to subcellular localization – impacts molecular and cellular function, and how this goes awry in disease. [X/Twitter: @KalliKappel]
Prof. Steffen Lindert, currently a professor of chemistry and biochemistry at Ohio State University, will join the department as an associate professor on July 1, 2025. At UCLA, research in the Lindert group will focus on the development and application of computational techniques for modeling biological systems, with the goal of gaining a deeper understanding of biomolecular processes, predicting protein structure with the use of sparse experimental data, and discovering new drugs. [X/Twitter: @LindertLab]
Dr. Stefan Petrovic, currently a postdoctoral scholar in the Hoelz lab at the California Institute of Technology, will join the department as an assistant professor on November 1, 2024. At UCLA, the Petrovic group will use biochemical and structural biology approaches to investigate the molecular architecture and cell biology of tight junctions (TJs), which regulate molecule passage between neighboring cells and contribute to the polarization and integrity of epithelial and endothelial tissues. Understanding the physiological roles of TJs could lead to treatments for diseases linked to TJ dysfunction, such as cancers, infectious diseases, neurological disorders, gastrointestinal disorders, and autoimmune conditions, and enable the development of technologies to modulate TJ permeability for improved drug targeting and tissue protection. [X/Twitter: @petroviclab] Read an in-depth article about Petrovic here.
Penny Jennings, UCLA Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry, penny@chem.ucla.edu.
