Carolyn R. Bertozzi

Dr. Carolyn Ruth Bertozzi is an award-winning chemist. She is the T.Z. and Irmgard Chu Distinguished Professor of Chemistry and Professor of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley; Professor of Molecular and Cellular Pharmacology at the University of California, San Francisco; is an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute; and Director of the Molecular Foundry, a nanoscience research center at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. She was one of the youngest scientists ever to receive a MacArthur "genius" award, at only 33 years.

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Biography

Bertozzi was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1966. She received her bachelor's in chemistry at Harvard University, where she worked with Joe Grabowski on the design and construction of a photoacoustic calorimeter. After graduating she worked briefly at Bell Labs with Chris Chidsey and at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Bertozzi completed her Ph.D. at Berkeley in 1993 with Mark Bednarski, working on the chemical synthesis of oligosaccharide analogs. She was a postdoctoral fellow at UCSF with Steven Rosen, where she studied the activity of endothelial oligosaccharides in promoting cell adhesion at inflammation sites. Bertozzi joined the UC Berkeley faculty in 1996.

Bertozzi studies the glycobiology underlying diseases such as cancer, inflammatory disorders such as arthritis, and infectious diseases such as tuberculosis. In particular, Bertozzi has significantly advanced understanding of cell surface oligosaccharides involved in cell recognition and inter-cellular communication.

The Bertozzi lab has also developed significant tools for research, including chemical tools for studying glycans in living systems and more recently nanotechnologies for probing biological systems.

Bertozzi's father, William Bertozzi [1], and sister, Andrea Bertozzi [2], are also scientists.

Significant Papers and Publications

• Science 1997
• Science 2000
• Prescher / Bertozzi Nature , the Staudinger ligation paper
• Glycochemistry (2001) edited by Peng George Wang and Bertozzi

Awards and Honors

• Ernst Schering Prize (2007)
• Elected member (2005), National Academy of Sciences
• Havinga Medal, Univ. Leiden (2005)
• Agnes Fay Morgan Research Award (2004), Iota Sigma Pi
• The T.Z. and Irmgard Chu Distinguished Professorship in Chemistry, UC Berkeley (2005)
• Berkeley's Distinguished Teaching Award (2001)
• The Donald Sterling Noyce Prize for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching (2001)
• MacArthur Fellowship (1999)
• Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award (1999), American Chemical Society
• Elected member (2003), American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science (2002)
• Irving Sigal Young Investigator Award of the Protein Society (2002)
• Phi Beta Kappa (1987)
• ACS Award in Pure Chemistry
• Merck Academic Development Program Award
• Glaxo Wellcome Scholars' Award
• Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering
• Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award
• Hoarce S. Isbell Award in Carbohydrate Chemistry
• Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship

Notes and References

• Mary Beth Gardiner, "The Right Chemistry" (profile of Bertozzi), HHMI Bulletin Winter 2005, available at http://www.hhmi.org/bulletin/pdf/winter2005/Bertozzi.pdf