News
12/19/2018
Burkart & Pomeroy part of team of researchers awarded $2M to advance algae based renewable polymers
Stephen Mayfield, PI in Biological Sciences, along with Mike Burkart and Skip Pomeroy will work "to develop novel platforms to produce biologically based monomers that will be used to manufacture renewable and biodegradable versions of plastic polymers called polyurethanes." “We propose to develop novel algae platforms for the production of one of the key monomers used to make polyurethane polymers, while simultaneously developing basic tools to enable improved algal production systems that will accelerate the process from initial concept to market supply,” said Mayfield, who directs the California Center for Algae Biotechnology and the Food & Fuel for the 21st Century program.
12/09/2018
Wei Xiong Receives NSF CAREER Award
The National Science Foundation CAREER awards are the National Science Foundation's most prestigious awards in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through research, education and the integration of education and research within the context of the mission of their organizations. The award comes with a federal grant for research and education activities for five consecutive years. NSF grants these awards once a year. The reviewing, award and selection process is one of the most competitive within the NSF.
11/27/2018
Robert Continetti named Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science
Seven researchers at the University of California San Diego have been named Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the largest general science organization in the United States and publisher of the journal Science. These researchers include Distinguished Professor and Senior Associate Vice Chancellor Robert Continetti an experimental physical chemist who has broadly contributed to the study of molecular reaction dynamics by developing coincidence imaging techniques for transient molecules and clusters. The senior associate vice chancellor for academic affairs and distinguished professor of chemistry and biochemistry is renowned for his novel studies of energetics and dissociation dynamics of transient species. He has provided experimental data essential for improving the understanding of complex chemical phenomena in the gas phase. Over the last 25 years, he and his colleagues have carried out several groundbreaking, sophisticated measurements, emphasizing photodetachment and dissociative photodetachment processes of negative ions, many-body dissociation dynamics and charge transfer processes important in atmospheric, combustion and astrophysical processes. As a bold experimentalist, he trains his students in the full range of experimental apparatus design, construction and implementation. His research program has recently entered a new domain--the spectroscopy and impact dynamics of aerosols and nanoparticles using a newly developed "Aerosol Impact Machine." New Fellows will recognized during a ceremony Saturday, Feb. 16, from 8 to 10 a.m. Eastern Time at the AAAS Fellows Forum during the 2019 AAAS Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C.
10/19/2018
Professor Judy Kim appointed as Associate Dean of the Graduate Division
Congratulations to Professor Judy Kim on her recent appointment as Associate Dean of Graduate Division. Professor Kim has made considerable service contributions since joining UC San Diego in 2005. In particular, Professor Kim played a pivotal role in undergraduate and graduate education through her service as Vice Chair of Education for the Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry from 2012 to 2017. Professor Kim’s ongoing excellence in educational leadership make her an ideal choice for this important role in the Graduate Division.
10/12/2018
Vicki Grassian named Fellow of the American Physical Society
Vicki Grassian, distinguished professor in the Departments of Chemistry & Biochemistry, Nanoengineering and at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, was nominated by the Division of Chemical Physics for groundbreaking contributions in understanding the surface structure and reactivity of environmental interfaces, including carbonate and oxide surfaces, under ambient conditions of temperature and relative humidity and delineating the important role of adsorbed water.
09/21/2018
Paesani Group receives funding as part of DOE's Exascale Computing Initiative
Prof. Francesco Paesani is one of 10 groups to receive funding from the U.S. Department of Energy to develop advanced software for the design of new chemicals and chemical processes for energy production and a range of other potential applications.
09/14/2018
NSF Awards $20 Million for Continued Study of Aerosols at UC San Diego
UC San Diego’s largest center gets five-year extension. The National Science Foundation (NSF) has renewed a groundbreaking University of California San Diego atmospheric chemistry research program with a $20 million grant that will support operations for a second five-year period. The grant will enable the NSF Center for Aerosol Impacts on Chemistry of the Environment (CAICE) to launch new studies into how pollution interacts with natural ocean-produced aerosols. CAICE is led by Professor Kimberly Prather, Distinguished Chair in Atmospheric Chemistry and a faculty member at Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at UC San Diego and is one of the Centers of Chemical Innovation supported by the Chemistry Division of NSF. CAICE involves many researchers in the Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry and Scripps Institution of Oceanography as well as researchers at other academic institutions including Yale, UC Davis, UC Irvine, University of Iowa, Ohio State University, Skidmore College and Colorado State University. Congratulations to Professor Prather and the members of CAICE on this renewal grant.
08/02/2018
Prof. Robert Continetti named Senior Associate Vice Chancellor - Academic Affairs.
Dr. Continetti will serve as a principal advisor to Executive Vice Chancellor Simmons on all Academic Personnel matters, and provide leadership at the intersection between the academic mission and administrative processes in the key areas of Academic Planning, Resource Management and Planning, and Space and Capital Planning for the General Campus. In this role, he will oversee and manage the Senate and non-Senate academic personnel process, serving as the EVC’s primary liaison with the Committee on Academic Personnel (CAP), and providing oversight for academic compensation and academic employee relations matters. In coordination with the Deans of Undergraduate Education and Graduate Division, he will administer the planning and implementation of new campus academic programs and initiatives that involve multiple divisions within the General Campus divisions or academic divisions across campus, such as the Strategic Academic Program Development (SAPD) initiative. He will co-lead the campus re-accreditation process with the Dean of Undergraduate Education, and will contribute to numerous collaborative Senate-Administration efforts.
07/20/2018
Prof. Emeritus John Wheeler receives The Edward A. Dickson Award
Prof. Emeritus John Wheeler receives The Edward A. Dickson Award. Edward A. Dickson served as a Regent of the University of California from 1913 to 1946, the longest tenure of any regent. In 1955, Mr. Dickson presented the university with an endowment to support and maintain special annual professorships to be awarded to retired academic senate faculty members. Dickson stipulated that the earnings from this endowment would both stimulate and recognize emeriti for their continuing service, teaching, and research. Congratulations Prof. Wheeler!
07/19/2018
Professor Judy Kim named 2018 Fellow of the American Chemical Society
The American Chemical Society (ACS) has awarded the distinction of fellow to Professor Judy Kim. The ACS Fellows Program recognizes and honors members of the American Chemical Society for their outstanding achievements in and contributions to the science and the profession and for their equally exemplary service to the Society. Professor Kim was recognized for her contributions to biophysical chemistry and spectroscopy, with a focus on membrane protein folding and amino acid radicals, and for her service to the Division of Physical Chemistry, including the Biophysical Subdivision and Undergraduate Physical Chemistry Awards, as well as her leadership as Vice Chair of the Graduate Education Advisory Board. Professor Kim has been a faculty member at UC San Diego since 2005. She has developed a program focused on biophysical chemistry where she investigates biomolecules in cell membranes. Her research exemplifies the exciting progress that can be made in understanding biological processes by working at the intersection of chemistry, physics, and biology. Besides her research, Professor Kim has been a leader in undergraduate and graduate education and served as Vice Chair of Education for the Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry from 2012 to 2017. She will be honored at the Fall 2018 National Meeting of the American Chemical Society in Boston this August. We congratulate to Professor Kim for receiving this well-deserved distinction!
07/09/2018
Antifreeze Proteins Stop Ice Cold
To survive subzero temperatures, some insects possess special antifreeze proteins that allow their bodies to resist freezing by binding to the surface of new ice crystals, preventing them from further crystallization in the insects’ bodies. Determining the exact mechanism for this process has proven difficult, however, due to the need to separate the signal of the small area around the protein binding with the ice from that of the surrounding water and ice surface. Prof. Paesani and postdoc Daniel Moberg teamed up with Prof. Molinero and her graduate student Arpa Hudait of the University of Utah. Together, they examined this system at multiple temporal and spatial resolutions to both explain how this binding may occur and provide the first infrared and Raman spectra of the isolated binding site. The study is reported in the July 9th issue of PNAS.
07/05/2018
Professor Yuen-Zhou Receives DOE Early Career Award
The Office of Science has selected 84 scientists from across the nation—including 55 from U.S. universities—to receive significant funding for research as part of the DOE’s Early Career Research Program. The Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry’s Joel Yuen Zhou was one of the new awardees who will receive $150,000 during each of the next five years for salary and expenses related to his work on emergent photophysics and photochemistry of molecular polaritons.
07/05/2018
Galperin Lab Developing a Unifying Framework for Molecular Optoelectronics
Optical spectroscopy has long been a first line molecular characterization method. As our technology has advanced to the nanoscale, experimentalists can now couple optical spectroscopy with single-molecule, current-carrying nanojunctions. In a recent publication in Chemical Society Reviews, Galperin argues that the theoretical approach traditionally used in non-linear optical spectroscopy, bare perturbation theory formulated in Liouville space, falls short when nanojunctions are subject to bias or a quantized radiation field. Rather, he proposes that a non-equilibrium Green’s function approach is a convenient tool to study quantum transport tied to either classical or quantum radiation. Adoption of a unifying theoretical framework may help the community gain greater insight into fundamental processes, and ultimately may help guide the design and development of molecular logic devices, sensors, or photovoltaics.
07/02/2018
The Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry welcomes three new faculty July 1, 2018.
06/27/2018
Neal Devaraj named the 2018 Blavatnik National Laureate in Chemistry
The 2018 Laureates of the Blavatnik National Awards for Young Scientists, will each receive $250,000: the largest unrestricted scientific prize offered to America’s most promising faculty-level scientific researchers 42 years of age and younger. Nominated by 146 research institutions across 42 states, the 286 nominees were narrowed to a pool of 31 Blavatnik National Finalists. From this pool of Finalists, a distinguished scientific jury chose three outstanding Laureates, one in each of the Awards’ scientific disciplinary categories—Life Sciences, Physical Sciences & Engineering, and Chemistry.
06/08/2018
Raphael Ribeiro from the Yuen-Zhou group wins 2018 ACS PHYS Young Investigator Award
Raphael Ribeiro Wins 2018 PHYS Young Investigator Award of the Physical Chemistry division of ACS
06/08/2018
Congratulations to Mang Lin (Thiemens Lab) for winning the Chancellor's Dissertation Medal award!
"Development of new analytical techniques for measuring radiosulfur in terrestrial samples to understand the present-day and Archean atmospheric sulfur cycles"
06/07/2018
Prof. Paesani a featured speaker at the Telluride Science Research Center Town Talks
"Machine-Learning Molecular Models for Water Purification Technologies"
06/04/2018
Prof. Devaraj Makes List of Finalists for 2018 Blavatnik National Awards
The Blavatnik Family Foundation announced the 31 U.S. National Finalists who will compete for the world’s largest unrestricted prizes for early career scientists—$250,000. The finalists were chosen from a field of more than 280 outstanding researchers. Three overall winners from three categories (Life Sciences, Chemistry, and Physical Sciences & Engineering) will be announced Sept. 24 at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.
05/07/2018
Tezcan Lab creates a new form of material
All materials suffer from a fundamental limitation: If a substance is highly ordered, it tends to be inflexible and brittle. If it is highly flexible and adaptive, it tends to be disordered. Three graduate students in the Tezcan Lab, Ling Zhang, Jake Bailey and Rohit Subramanian, have circumvented this limitation by engineering a new material by integrating protein crystals with hydrogel polymers. These crystal-gel hybrids can reversibly expand by more than 500% in volume without losing crystalline order, resist fragmentation and self-heal efficiently, which conventional crystals are not capable of. The study is reported in the May 3rd issue of the journal Nature.
05/07/2018
Prof. Wei Xiong and his group receive 2018 DoD DURIP Award
Prof. Wei Xiong and his group receive 2018 DoD Defense University Research Instrumentation Program (DURIP) Award. The Xiong group will develop a tabletop time-resolved soft x-ray spectrometer under the support of this award.
05/07/2018
Prof. Grassian to receive 2018 AIC Chemical Pioneer Award in Philadelphia
Professor Vicki H. Grassian has been selected to receive the 2018 Chemical Pioneer Award by the American Institute of Chemists (http://www.theaic.org/awards_chem_pioneer.html). The award started in 1966 for the purpose of recognizing chemists, chemical engineers or their associates who have made outstanding contributions which have had a major impact on advances in the chemical science and industry and/or the chemical profession. Past award recipients include several UC San Diego Professor Harold Urey who received the award in 1969. Professor Grassian has been selected for this award for her significant contributions to the area of heterogeneous atmospheric chemistry and the emerging area of the environmental and health effects of nanomaterials. Her award addressed entitled “The Physical Chemistry of Environmental Interfaces” will be presented at the Science History Institute in Philadelphia on May 10, 2018.
05/07/2018
Congratulations to the 2018 recipients of the Frieda Daum Urey Endowed Fellowship!
We proudly announce that Khin San from the Schimpf Lab and Jessie Moreton from the Cohen Lab have been awarded the 2018 Frieda Daum Urey Endowed Fellowship!
05/03/2018
Experiments and computation lead to the design & understanding of novel, responsive biomaterials
In a publication in Nature Chemistry, the collaborative team of the Tezcan Lab and Prof. Francesco Paesani report the first example of a synthetic protein assembly whose free energy landscape is fully mapped out by computation and experiment, and whose structural dynamics can be predictably engineered. To date, efforts in biomolecular design have overwhelmingly focused on obtaining inflexible architectures that assemble predominantly via high-affinity interactions into enthalpically favored structures. Led by Robert Alberstein, a graduate student in the Tezcan Lab, the team has now created 2D, porous protein lattices, whose dynamics are controlled by water entropy. Guided by computer simulations, the team has engineered the protein lattices to control their porosity in a predictable manner, which has important implications for applications in separation, filtration, sensing and catalysis.
05/02/2018
Professor Kristie Boering Elected to U.S. National Academy of Sciences
Professor Kristie Boering, a 1985 graduate from our Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, winner of the Harold C. Urey award for outstanding graduating senior was just elected to the U.S. National Academy. She did isotope research in Professor Thiemens group and received a PhD from Stanford University with Professor John Brauman. In her Post Doctoral research with Professor Steve Wofsy at Harvard she developed airborne and balloon instruments to study the global carbon cycle and flew missions around the world. She is presently a Professor at UC Berkeley in the Departments of Chemistry and Earth and Planetary Sciences with programs that isotopically study the nitrogen cycle, stratosphere-troposphere mixing, global change on long time scales and the earths and Titans early atmosphere using stable isotopes and global chemical modeling. Her work also includes basic photochemistry using crossed molecular beam and synchrotron UV light.
05/01/2018
Congratulations to Chris Fisher, winner of the GSA Outstanding Graduate Student Leader Award!
Please show your support by joining us at the GSA Community Award Ceremony at the Loft Thursday, May 3rd from 4-6pm! All grads and faculty are welcome to attend.
04/22/2018
In celebration of Earth Month, the UCSD Chemistry & Biochemistry Department is pleased to announce our “Green Chemistry Commitment”.
04/20/2018
The Xiong group, in collaboration with the Yuen-Zhou group publish paper in PNAS
The Xiong group, in collaboration with the Yuen-Zhou group and scientists at Naval Research Laboratory, reported the first coherent two-dimensional infrared (2D IR) spectroscopy of molecular polariton, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. Molecular vibrational-polaritons are hybrid states between molecular vibrations and photons. While they are highly promising for new opportunities to manipulate molecular potential energy landscapes and concomitantly modify reaction pathways, amongst many others, their fundamental physical properties remain elusive. By conducting experimental and theoretical studies of 2D IR spectroscopy, this work uniquely resolves excitation of polaritons and unexpected dark states in a state-selective manner, revealing otherwise hidden interactions between them. Valuable physical insights such as existence of hidden dark states, and ultrafast interactions between darks states and bright polariton states, are unambiguously measured. These results have significant implications in harvesting the creation of molecular vibrational polaritons for novel infrared photonic devices, lasing, molecular quantum simulation, as well as new chemistry by tailoring potential energy landscapes. A graduate student Bo Xiang from Xiong group and a postdoctoral fellow Raphael Ribeiro led the experimental and theoretical efforts, respectively.
04/17/2018
Jessica Moreton, 2nd place winner of the UCSD Grad SLAM contest
Congratulations to Jessica Moreton (Cohen lab) on placing 2nd in the UCSD Grad SLAM contest!
04/13/2018
Mark Kalaj (Cohen lab) awarded the NDSEG
Congratulations to Mark Kalaj (Cohen lab) on being awarded the National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship (NDSEG)!!
04/04/2018
Congratulations to the 2018 Recipients of the NSF-GRFP!
We proudly announce that the National Science Foundation has selected Glen Junor from the Bertrand Lab, Liora Mael from the Grassian lab, Christian Seitz from the Amaro lab and Terra Sztain-Pedone from the Burkart lab in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry as recipients of the 2018 Graduate Research Fellowship!
02/16/2018
Vicki Grassian elected Chair of Chemistry Section of the AAAS
Vicki Grassian has been elected Chair-Elect of the Chemistry Section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). She begins her term as Chair Elect on February 20th 2018 following the AAAS annual meeting. This position begins a three year chair line succession of Chair-Elect, Chair, and Retiring Chair. Vicki has been a Fellow of AAAS since 2005. The Association for the Advancement of Science is the world's largest general scientific society and publisher of the journal Science. For results of the election of AAAS officers see:
02/16/2018
Daniela Rhodes to Give DeLuca Lecture at UC San Diego
Nanyang Technological University Professor Daniela Rhodes will deliver the Marlene A. DeLuca Lecture at the University of California San Diego on Thursday, February 22. In her lecture, entitled “G-quadruplexes: the Cinderella of Nucleic Acid Structures”, Rhodes will summarize recent evidence for the in vivo presence and function of DNA and RNA G-quadruplexes in various cellular pathways including DNA replication, gene expression and telomere maintenance. The lecture begins at 4:00 p.m. in the Leichtag Family Foundation Biomedical Research Building Auditorium (Room 107). The lecture is free and open to the public. Light refreshments before the start of the lecture.
02/02/2018
Murray Goodman Endowed Lecture (14th year)- February 5, 2018 at 4:30PM
Goodman Endowed Lecture will be held of February 5, 2018 at 4:30PM in the Natural Sciences Building (NSB) Auditorium. Dr. Peter G. Schultz, CEO and Professor of Chemistry at The Scripps Research Institute, will present his Lecture entitled: ‘Playing with the Molecules of Life.’
01/25/2018
In an article published in Nature Communications, the Paesani group, in collaboration with the Galli group at the University of Chicago, provides answers to a decades-long question: What happens in the short time period following the injection of an electron into water? This study was made possible by combining the MB-pol many-body potential energy function developed by the Paesani group, which exhibits unprecedented accuracy in predicting the behavior of water across different phases, with highly accurate theoretical methods developed by the Galli group to study excited states of matter. The results demonstrate that the binding energy of an electron with water is much smaller than previously thought, and varies significantly depending on whether the electron is located at the surface or in the bulk. These findings have important consequences both at the fundamental and application levels, providing new insights into the properties of water that are key to understanding reduction/oxidation reactions in aqueous solutions, which are widespread in chemistry, biology, and materials research.
01/19/2018
Welcome Assistant Professor Lalit Deshmukh
Dr. Deshmukh was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and received his PhD from the University of Connecticut. Welcome Lalit!
01/18/2018
Nobel Prize Winner Joachim Frank to Give Kamen Lecture at UC San Diego
Columbia University Professor Joachim Frank, winner of the 2017 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, will deliver the Martin D. Kamen Lecture at the University of California San Diego on Thursday, January 25. In his lecture, entitled “Single-Particle Cryo-EM: The Sky is the Limit”, Frank will discuss the history and scientific community’s accomplishments, and provide a look into the future, for single-particle cryo-electron microscopy. The lecture begins at 4:00 p.m. in the Health Sciences Education Center Auditorium in the Skaggs Pharmaceutical Sciences Building. The lecture is free and open to the public. Refreshments will be served before the start of the lecture.
01/12/2018
Welcome Assistant Professor Colleen McHugh
Dr. McHugh was a Postdoctoral Researcher at Caltech and received her PhD from Johns Hopkins University. Welcome Colleen!