May 31, 2023
Eva Nogales, a senior faculty scientist in Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s (Berkeley Lab) Biosciences Area, has won the 2023 Shaw Prize in Life Science and Medicine for pioneering structural biology that enabled visualization, at the level of individual atoms, of the protein machines responsible for gene transcription, one of life’s fundamental processes. Nogales, who is also a…
May 26, 2023
Science has been considered a purely objective field of study that has produced research to cure diseases, map out the anatomies of living things and explore our planet and the universe. But UC Berkeley Bioengineering Professor Aaron Streets says it is important for those who conduct that research “to represent the full diversity of human…
May 26, 2023
Drinking water treatment technologies are typically evaluated for contaminant removal efficiency, capital costs and health impacts, but these narrow metrics do not fully capture why more than 2 billion people worldwide lack safe drinking water. To tackle this problem, researchers at UC Berkeley argue for an assessment of the “hidden” costs of these technologies, including…
May 18, 2023
For more than a century, biologists have wondered what the earliest animals were like when they first arose in the ancient oceans over half a billion years ago. Searching among today’s most primitive-looking animals for the earliest branch of the animal tree of life, scientists gradually narrowed the possibilities down to two groups: sponges, which…
May 16, 2023
Susan Marqusee, a biophysical chemist who headed the UC Berkeley arm of the California Institute of Quantitative Biosciences (QB3) for 10 years, until 2020, has been chosen to lead the Directorate for Biological Sciences of the National Science Foundation (NSF) — the major funder of basic life sciences research in the United States. “I am excited for…
May 09, 2023
A research team led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and UC Berkeley has engineered bacteria to produce new-to-nature carbon products that could provide a powerful route to sustainable biochemicals. The advance – which was recently announced in the journal Nature – uses bacteria to combine natural enzymatic reactions with a new-to-nature reaction called the “carbene…
May 04, 2023
Richard (Ed) Green, professor of biomolecular engineering, has been selected to serve as the next director of the California Institute of Quantitative Biosciences (QB3) at UC Santa Cruz. QB3 is the University of California’s hub for innovation and entrepreneurship in life science, working with UC researchers and other scientists to launch startup companies and partner…
May 04, 2023
Seven UC Berkeley faculty members were among 120 new members and 23 new international members of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) announced this week, an honor that recognizes their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research. The seven new members are neuroscientist Marla Feller, herpetologist Tyrone Hayes, economists Hilary Hoynes and Emmanuel Saez, chemists Jeffrey Long and T. Don Tilley and biochemist Donald Rio. There…