The Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry welcomes visionary innovator Professor Kalli Kappel, who joined UCLA as an Assistant Professor on July 1, 2025.
“We are delighted to welcome Kalli Kappel to UCLA,” said Professor Miguel García-Garibay, UCLA’s Dean of Physical Sciences. “She is a rising star in the fields of biophysics and computational biology. Coupled with her strong interests in training a new generation of scientists at the interface of chemistry, biology, and computational science, Kalli will greatly enhance UCLA’s position as a top-tier educational institution.”
Kappel received her B.S. in Physics from the University of California, San Diego, where she worked with Professor Andrew McCammon to study protein dynamics and protein-ligand interactions using computational approaches. She received her Ph.D. in Biophysics from Stanford University, where she focused on developing computational methods to predict RNA structures and the interactions between RNA and proteins with Professor Rhiju Das. She developed a comprehensive toolkit of computational methods to model the structures and energetics of these complexes. Kappel then did her postdoctoral training at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard with Professor Aviv Regev and Professor Feng Zhang, where she focused on developing high-throughput experimental approaches to characterize how protein sequences dictate their subcellular organization.
Her graduate work was supported by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and a Gabilan Stanford Graduate Fellowship. Her many awards include the Student Research Achievement Award from the Biophysical Society and the ACS Chemical Computing Group Excellence Award for Graduate Students from the American Chemical Society. Her postdoctoral work was supported by a Schmidt Science Fellowship and the HHMI Hanna H. Gray Fellowship, an award which will continue to support Kappel’s lab at UCLA.
At UCLA, the Kappel Lab will focus on developing predictive sequence-structure-function models of RNA, proteins, and their interactions by combining high-throughput experiments, machine learning, and computational biophysical methods. The biophysical properties of RNA and protein molecules govern their functions in cells. The molecular structures, binding energetics, and their propensity to form higher-order assemblies or condensates fundamentally govern complex cellular processes, including gene expression, protein synthesis, and cell signaling. Her group aims to develop tools to predict these intracellular biophysical properties from primary protein and RNA sequences.
“Her research program is hugely ambitious and will not only be of high value to the structural biology community, but will also have significant translational implications for human health,” said Professor Joseph Loo, head of the Biochemistry Faculty Search Committee.
In addition to her research, Kappel is deeply committed to training and mentoring the next generation of scientists. She was a peer mentor while in the Schmidt Science Fellows program and was a mentor in the Stanford Institutes of Medicine Summer Research Program. As an undergraduate at UCSD, she spent two years as a chemistry and physics tutor at the Preuss School UC San Diego, a middle and high school for low-income students who would be the first in their families to graduate from college.
Kappel can be followed on social media at the following handles:
- X/Twitter: @KalliKappel
- Bluesky: @kallikappel.bsky.social
By Kelsea Valerio, UCLA Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry, kvalerio@ucla.edu
