MBIB News

Faculty scientist Jennifer Doudna was recently honored by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego, which awarded her the 2019 Nierenberg Prize for Science in the Public Interest, and by the Microbiology Society, which bestowed its 2019 Prize Medal on her.

Holger Müller has been elected as a 2019 Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS). An associate professor of physics at UC Berkeley and a faculty scientist in Molecular Biophysics and Integrated Bioimaging (MBIB), he was nominated by the APS Topical Group Precision Measurement & Fundamental Constants. Müller, whose worked is premised on the notion that precision measurements of fundamental quantities can help address the great challenges facing physicists, was cited “for advances in the manipulation of matter waves, including their application to precision measurement of the fine structure constant, to constraint on forces from light scalar fields posited to be dark energy candidates, and to the development of a phase plate for electron microscopy.”

Using a forward genetics approach, a team of Biosciences researchers revealed that the enzyme hexokinase (HXK1), which is involved in sugar metabolism in organisms ranging from bacteria to plants to humans, is necessary for the regulation of photosynthesis and metabolism in the green alga Chromochloris zofngiensis. Kris Niyogi, a faculty scientist in Molecular Biophysics and Integrated Bioimaging (MBIB), was senior author on the paper, published in Nature Communications Biology.

Molecular Biophysics and Integrated Bioimaging (MBIB) Division Director Paul Adams has announced a number of changes in the Division leadership, effective October 1. Earlier this summer, Corie Ralston agreed to serve as the Interim Director of the Molecular Foundry’s Biological Nanostructures Facility. She will step down as MBIB Division Deputy and remain as the Head of the Berkeley Center for Structural Biology (BCSB) at the Advanced Light Source (ALS).

Molecular Biophysics and Integrated Bioimaging (MBIB) faculty scientist Markita Landry and Environmental Genomics and Systems Biology (EGSB) faculty scientist Niren Murthy are among the seven UC Berkeley faculty named to the 2019-20 cohort of Bakar Fellows. The UCB program fosters faculty entrepreneurship in fields including engineering, computer science, the biological and physical sciences, and architecture. The honor is bestowed on researchers with novel ideas and an entrepreneurial spirit, giving them the money and time to translate their laboratory breakthroughs into technologies ready for the marketplace.