Professional Titles:
T.Z. and Irmgard Chu Distinguished Chair in Chemistry and Professor of Molecular and Cell BiologyBiography:
Alanna Schepartz was born and raised in New York City. She received her undergraduate training in chemistry at the State University of New York-Albany, her Ph.D. in organic chemistry at Columbia University, and spent just under 2 years as a postdoctoral fellow at Caltech, where she began to learn about the then-new field of chemical biology. She joined the faculty at Yale in 1988 as an Assistant Professor, was promoted to the rank of Full Professor in 1995, and was named a Sterling Professor in 2017. In 2019, Alanna moved to the University of California, Berkeley where she is now the C.Z. and Irmgard Chu Distinguished Chair of Chemistry and Professor of Molecular and Cell Biology. She is also a Faculty Affiliate of the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences (QB3). She and her research group are known for the creative application of chemical synthesis and logic to probe mechanism and catalyze discovery in both chemistry and biology. Her research has contributed to and shaped thinking in multiple areas, including the mechanisms of protein-DNA recognition and transcriptional activation; protein design and engineering and their application to synthetic biology; and the complex process by which chemical information is communicated across biological membranes. She is widely recognized for the pioneering design of miniature proteins and b-peptide bundles, the first and only example of a protein-like architecture that lacks even a single a-amino acid.