Biosciences Area

Two from Biosciences Named AAAS Fellows

Two scientists from the Biosciences Area, Cheryl Kerfeld and David Schaffer, have been named Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). They join fellow Lab scientists Rebecca Abergel in the Chemical Sciences Division, Roland Burgmann and Michael Manga in the Earth and Environmental Sciences Area Energy Geosciences Division, and Natalie Roe, Director of the Physics Division, in receiving the distinction of Fellow this year for “their scientifically or socially distinguished efforts to advance science or its applications.”

Amy Herr Receives UCB Faculty Award for Mentoring

Amy Herr has received the 2019 Faculty Award for Excellence in Postdoctoral Mentoring at UC Berkeley. The award from the Visiting Scholar and Postdoc Affairs Program recognizes the critical role mentoring plays in growing recent PhDs into leaders in academia and industry. Herr is a professor of bioengineering at UC Berkeley and a Berkeley Lab Biosciences Area faculty engineer with a primary appointment in Biological Systems and Engineering (BSE) and a secondary appointment in Molecular Biophysics and Integrated Bioimaging (MBIB). She was selected from an esteemed group of UC Berkeley faculty by a committee of the Berkeley Postdoctoral Association.

Jennifer Doudna Honored with Two Prizes

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 Mueller Elected 2019 APS Fellow

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.”

A Molecular Switch for Photosynthesis and Lipid Accumulation

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.

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