Student Hosted Colloquia: Professor Michelle Chang, UC Berkeley

Student Hosted Colloquia: Professor Michelle Chang, UC Berkeley (Host: Yanni Kipouros)

**This seminar is available for in-person attendance.**

"Synthetic Biology Approaches to New Chemistry"

About the Seminar

Living systems have evolved the capacity to carry out many chemical transformations of interest to synthetic chemistry if they could be redesigned for targeted purposes. However, our ability to mix and match enzymes to construct de novo pathways for the cellular production of small molecule targets is limited by insufficient understanding how chemistry works inside a living cell. Our group is interested in using synthetic biology as a platform to study how enzymes function in vivo and to use this understanding to build new synthetic pathways for the production of pharmaceuticals, nanomaterials, and fuels using living cells.

About the Speaker

Michelle is a professor at UC Berkeley in the Departments of Chemistry, Molecular and Cell Biology, and Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. She received her Ph.D. from MIT, working with JoAnne Stubbe and Daniel Nocera, and her postdoctoral training with Jay Keasling at UC Berkeley. Her research group works at the interface of enzymology and synthetic biology. She has received the Dreyfus New Faculty Award, TR35 Award, Beckman Young Investigator Award, NSF CAREER Award, Agilent Early Career Award, NIH New Innovator Award, DARPA Young Faculty Award, Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, 3M Young Faculty Award, Cope Scholar Award, and Pfizer Award in Enzyme Chemistry.