Faculty Award Recipients in the News

This fall, ChEnected is introducing readers to the recipients of AIChE’s 2020 Institute and Board of Directors’ Awards, which are AIChE’s highest honors. Recipients are nominated by the chemical engineering community and voted on by the members of AIChE’s volunteer-led Awards Committee. These awards recognize outstanding achievements and world-class contributions across a spectrum of chemical engineering endeavors. 

Deb Agarwal, head of the Data Science and Technology Department in the Computational Research Division, and Kathy Yelick, former Associate Lab Director for Computing Sciences, will be presented with the Berkeley Lab Citation at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s 2020 Director’s Awards at 3 p.m. on Thursday, November 12.

Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, Raymond and Beverly Sackler Chair and Professor of Biochemistry, Biophysics and Structural Biology Carlos Bustamante has been awarded the 2021 Biophysical Society (BPS) Kazuhiko Kinosita Award in Single-Molecule Biophysics.

University of California, Berkeley, biochemist Jennifer Doudna today won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, sharing it with colleague Emmanuelle Charpentier for the co-development of CRISPR-Cas9, a genome editing breakthrough that has revolutionized biomedicine.

Genzel shared half the prize with UCLA's Andrea Ghez for mapping the Milky Way's central black hole; Roger Penrose received the other half.

Polina Lishko, a physiologist whose work at UC Berkeley has already led to the development of promising new non-hormonal contraceptives for women and could lead to male or unisex contraceptives, has been chosen to receive a 2020 MacArthur “genius” Award.

UC Berkeley psychologist Stephen Hinshaw has won the National Academy of Medicine’s 2020 Rhoda and Bernard Sarnat International Prize in Mental Health for his contributions to the understanding and treatment of mental health conditions in childhood and adolescence and for his efforts to reduce the stigma of mental illness.

Two recently arrived faculty members, Song Sun in mathematics and Geoff Penington in physics, are among 12 early-career scientists sharing New Horizons Prizes, which are awarded each year by the Breakthrough Foundation.

Neuroscientist Corey Goodman, a longtime researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, who went on to start numerous biotech companies and, most recently, co-founded a venture capital firm, has been awarded the 2020 Gruber Neuroscience Prize.

UC Berkeley psychologist Stephen Hinshaw has won two distinguished awards for his vast body of research, including his work on developmental psychopathology, the stigmatization of mental illness and longitudinal studies of girls and women with ADHD.

Chemist Dean Toste, biochemist James Hurley and astrophysicist Eliot Quataert are the latest University of California, Berkeley, faculty members elected to the prestigious National Academy of Sciences (NAS), a group that has provided policy guidance to the U.S. government since 1863.

Nine UC Berkeley faculty members from a wide range of disciplines have been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS), a 240-year-old organization honoring the country’s most accomplished artists, scholars, scientists and leaders.