News Archive

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John Hartwig Awarded Wolf Prize in Chemistry — John Hartwig, head of the Catalysis and Chemical Transformations Program in the Chemical Sciences Division and professor of chemistry at UC Berkeley, has been awarded the Wolf Prize in Chemistry for the development of efficient transition-metal catalysts that have revolutionized drug manufacturing. More>
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Francesca M. Toma included in RSC "100 Women of Materials Science" — Francesca M. Toma included in Royal Society of Chemistry's "100 Women of Materials Science".
As a response to a report on the Diversity landscape of the chemical sciences that was published earlier this year, RSC recognizes the need for initiatives aimed at actively overcoming barriers, to aid the retention of women in academia and encourage their progression to leadership positions.
This collection aims to contribute towards this goal by showcasing high-quality work by female scientists, both to celebrate their own achievements in the field and to act as an inspiration for early career researchers within the community.
The Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) was founded in 1841 and is the UK’s largest professional body for chemical scientists with 54,000 members and an international publishing and knowledge business.
Link to RSC Celebrating Excellence in Research: Women of Materials Science
Link to the RSC report on Diversity
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Frances Houle elected to Board of Directors of the MRS — Frances Houle, CSD Senior Scientist and Deputy Director of the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis, has been elected to a three year term as member of the Board of Directors of the Materials Research Society (2019-2021). The MRS is an interdisciplinary society focused on all aspects of materials science from chemical, biological, physics and engineering perspectives with a goal of improving quality of life. It has approximately 14,000 members from 90 countries, representing numerous academic, industrial, nonprofit and government institutions. Members of the BOD are responsible for the Society’s technical and organization governance, and work to formulate policy and strategy to advance the Society’s mission. More>
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Teresa Head-Gordon named ACS Fellow — The American Chemical Society has named Chancellor’s Professor of Chemistry, Bioengineering and Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Teresa Head-Gordon as an ACS Fellow for 2018. More>
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6 Berkeley Lab Researchers Receive DOE Early Career Research Awards — Six Berkeley Lab scientists have been selected by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science to receive significant funding for research through its Early Career Research Program. More>
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Berkeley Chemists Win Prestigious Royal Society of Chemistry Awards — The award winners include Christopher Chang, John Hartwig, Daniel Neumark, and Dean Toste, all with the Lab’s Chemical Sciences Division, and who hold joint appointments at UC Berkeley. The Royal Society of Chemistry chooses award winners for the originality and impact of their research, or for their contributions to the chemical sciences industry or chemistry education. More>
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Researchers Elected as Fellows of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences — James Demmel (left) of the Computational Research Division, and Dean Toste (center) and Birgitta Whaley of the Chemical Sciences Division, have been elected as fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Founded in 1780, the Academy honors exceptional scholars, leaders, artists, and innovators. The 2018 class includes such luminaries as actor Tom Hanks and author Ta-Nehisi Coates.
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Early Career LDRD Spotlight: Peter Agbo Looks to Nature for Better Fuels — April 10, 2018 – That Peter Agbo’s love for science and interest in the national labs started early in life is no surprise. His dad worked at Livermore Lab as an electrical engineer specializing in communications systems research, and his mom was a science teacher. But it wasn’t until he took “an amazing AP chemistry class” in high school that he knew he wanted to be a chemist, he said.
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Young professors receive Early Career Awards from DOE — August 10, 2017 – Lin Lin, an assistant professor of mathematics, and Eric Neuscamman, an assistant professor of chemistry, have received 2017 Early Career Research Program awards from the Department of Energy to further their work on new materials.
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Five Scientists Named AAAS Fellows —
November 21, 2016 – Five scientists have been named Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). They include Eleanor Blakely (Biosciences), Mary Gaillard (Physics), Howard Matis (Nuclear Science), Krishna Niyogi (Biosciences), and David Shuh (Chemical Sciences). More>
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Lab’s Abergel Receives ACS Rising Star Award for Women Scientists — WASHINGTON DC, October 26, 2016 – The award, sponsored by the Women Chemists Committee of the American Chemical Society, was established to help promote retention of women in science. Chemical scientist Rebecca Abergel is among the 2017 recipients. Watch Abergel explain creating a pill to treat radiation exposure at a 2014 Science at the Theater event.
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Lab Researchers Recognized by American Physical Society With 2017 Awards and Fellowships —
WASHINGTON DC, October 11, 2016 – The American Physical Society (APS) announced its Spring 2017 prize and award winners along with its new class of Fellows and numerous Berkeley Lab researchers are among those named. These honors are highly regarded, and represent critical recognition from the recipients’ most discerning audience, their peers.

Robert Lucchese of the Chemical Sciences Division was named as an APS Fellow.
Full Article >>
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2017 National Award Recipients — WASHINGTON DC, August 22, 2016 – Following are the recipients of awards administered by the American Chemical Society for 2017. Vignettes of the award recipients will appear in C&EN in early 2017. With the exception of the Arthur C. Cope Scholar Awards, these recipients will be honored at the Awards Ceremony on Tuesday, April 4, 2017, in conjunction with the 253rd ACS National Meeting in San Francisco, CA.
Receiving the Ahmed Zewail Award in Ultrafast Science and Technology, sponsored by the Ahmed Zewail Endowment Fund established by the Newport Corp., is Stephen R. Leone, University of California, Berkeley, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Full Article >>
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Francesca Toma Receives Alfredo di Braccio Award — NEW YORK, June 30, 2015 – The prestigious Italian National Academy of Science, which counts Galileo Galilei as one of its first members, assigns this prize to a top young scientist. Toma (Chemical Sciences) was honored for her prolific, high-quality scientific contribution in different aspects of nanotechnology. The ceremony took place on June 10 in Rome, which was attended by President of Italy Sergio Mattarella.
Full article >>
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2015 National Laureates — NEW YORK, June 30, 2015 – A chemist who has made important discoveries in both the human brain and sustainable energy, a neurosurgeon who has done pioneering work mapping the “blueprint” of how humans speak and hear, and a computer scientist who has changed our understanding of the capacity of wireless networks are the three winners of the 2015 Blavatnik National Awards for Young Scientists .
Honorees include Christopher J. Chang, PhD.
Full article >>
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Professor William H Miller ForMemRS — Kenneth S. Pitzer Distinguished Professor Emeritus, and Professor of the Graduate School, Department of Chemistry, University of California, Berkeley. Professor Miller’s papers over the last 45 years have essentially defined the field of theoretical chemical dynamics. Full Article >>
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Lab Researchers Among Five Faculty Named Bakar Fellows — Among the latest to join the ranks of the Bakar Fellows Program, which supports UC Berkeley faculty working to apply scientific discoveries to real-world issues, are Ke Xu of the Life Sciences Division, who works on super-resolution microscopy, and Holger Müller (pictured), a guest scientist in the Chemical Sciences Division. More >>
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Head-Gordon, Neumark, Nogales Elected to National Academy of Sciences — The academy is the nation’s oldest and most prestigious science organization. This year’s fellows include Martin Head-Gordon (left) and Daniel Neumark (center) of the Chemical Sciences Division, and Eva Nogales of the Life Sciences Division. Full Article >>
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American Academy of Arts and Sciences Elects New Members — Four Berkeley Lab-affiliated researchers have been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the academy has announced. The newly elected, lab-affiliated members, include Carlos Bustamante, John Clarke, John Hartwig, and Enrique Iglesia. More >>
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Lab Researchers Selected as APS Fellows —
This year’s recently announced American Physical Society (APS) Fellows include nine scientists from Berkeley Lab. APS Fellows are elected by their peers for “exceptional contributions to the physics enterprise; e.g., outstanding physics research, important applications of physics, leadership in or service to physics, or significant contributions to physics education.”
Full article >>
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Chemical Sciences Division’s Don Tilley Named ACS Fellow —
Tilley, a senior faculty chemist, was named by the American Chemical Society to the 2014 class of ACS Fellows. Tilley, an expert on inorganic and organometallic systems, was recognized for “discoveries of new transformations and compounds involving main group elements and the transition metals.” Full article >>
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F. Dean Toste Wins 2014 "Mitsui Chemicals Catalysis Science Award" —
CSD Faculty Scientist F. Dean Toste has won the 2014 award for "Introduction of Concepts and Catalysts for Organic Synthesis, including those based on Homogeneous Gold Catalysis and Chiral Anion Catalysis."
Professor Toste has pioneered the development of novel catalysts with gold complexes, high-valent metal oxides, and chiral counteranions including: (a) homogeneous low-valent gold catalysts; (b) high-valent metal oxide catalysts; and (c) chiral counteranion-assisted asymmetric metal-free phase-transfer catalysis. More recently he has developed metal catalyst-fermentation hybrid processes for the synthesis of biofuels and chemicals from biomass. Full article >>
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Four Lab Scientists Receive DOE Early Career Awards —
Four Berkeley Lab scientists are among the 35 researchers selected by the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Office of Science to receive significant funding for research as part of DOE’s Early Career Research Program. Lab awardees include (clockwise) the Chemical Sciences Division’s Rebecca Abergel, the Accelerator and Fusion Research Division’s Daniele Filippetto, the Material Sciences Division’s Alexander Weber‐Bargioni, and the Life Sciences Division’s Trent Northen. The effort, now in its fifth year, is designed to bolster the nation’s scientific workforce by providing support to exceptional researchers during the crucial early career years, when many scientists do their most formative work. More>
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Chemical Scientist Robert Bergman Wins Welch Award —
Berkeley Lab chemical scientist and UC Berkeley Professor Robert Bergman is the 2014 recipient of the Welch Award in Chemical Research for “pioneering work in alkane activation and mechanisms of organometallic reactions.” The Welch Foundation is one of the nation’s oldest and largest sources of private funding for basic research in chemistry. The foundation also cited Bergman’s vital contributions to the understanding of organometallic chemistry and particularly carbon-hydrogen bond activation and its application to drug development and cleaner energy. More>
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Chemical Scientist Rebecca Abergel Named Top 10 Innovator Under 35 —
Rebecca Abergel of the Chemical Sciences Division was named one of the top 10 innovators under 35 by MIT Technology Review, French edition. Abergel, who heads the Bioactinide Group, is leading development of a pill to decontaminate people in the event of radiation exposure, such as after a “dirty bomb” attack or an accident at a nuclear power plant. The nominations were open to both French citizens and foreigners residing in France. The winners of the regional competitions automatically become candidates for the global list of top 35 innovators under 35. Go here for more (article is in French). TaBL Article >>
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Tracking Catalytic Reactions in Microreactors —
Infrared Technique at Berkeley Lab’s Advanced Light Source Could Help Improve Flow Reactor Chemistry for Pharmaceuticals and Other Products.
A pathway to more effective and efficient synthesis of pharmaceutical drugs and other flow reactor chemical products has been opened by a study in which for the first time the catalytic reactivity inside a microreactor was mapped in high resolution from start-to-finish.
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Norman Edelstein, Two Other Berkeley Lab Scientists named AAAS 2013 Fellows —
Three Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) researchers have been named Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Election as a AAAS Fellow is an honor bestowed upon AAAS members by their peers.
This year 388 members have been awarded the honor by AAAS because of their scientifically or socially distinguished efforts to advance science or its applications.
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All Hands Toward Safety — Creating the safest, most productive work environment isn’t going to happen if you don’t have buy-in from every employee involved.
In the Chemical Sciences Division (CSD) we encourage everyone to help find controls to the safety hazards facing them. Who better knows their work environments?
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In Water as In Love, Likes Can Attract — Rich Saykally of the Chemical Sciences Division and David Pendergrast of the Molecular Foundry, working at the Advanced Light Source, have shown that in water as in love, likes can attract.
Full article >>
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Daniel Haxton, Four Other Berkeley Lab Researchers Receive DOE Early Career Awards