Prof. Chang joins us to deliver her RSC 2022 Centenary Prize Lecture.

16:00 - 17:00

followed by a drinks reception

Tues 21 March 2023

FAB 0.08 and Atrium

This event is for all Warwick students and staff. Registration required.

RSC 2022 Centenary Prize for seminal contributions in biosynthesis and biocatalysis to advance energy and environmental science and biomedical research, and for excellence in communication.

"Synthetic biology approaches to new chemistry"

Abstract

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. 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, materials, fuels, and other chemicals using living cells.

Biography

Michelle Chang is a professor at the University of California (UC), Berkeley, in the departments of chemistry, chemical and biomolecular engineering, and molecular and cell biology. She received her PhD from MIT and her postdoctoral training at UC Berkeley. Her research group works at the interface of enzymology and synthetic biology, studying how to utilise biocatalysis to produce pharmaceuticals, materials, fuels and other commodity chemicals using green chemistry.

Professor Chang has received the Dreyfus New Faculty 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, Arthur C Cope Scholar Award, and Pfizer Award in Enzyme Chemistry.