2021 - 2022 News

Below is a list of our Miller members who have recently received awards or who have been highlighted in the media. Also, the Miller Newsletters is another way to find out what is currently happening in our Miller Community.

  • Ray Jayawardhana (Miller Fellow 2000-2002) discusses space imagery as a modern space race.

  • Kelly (Thi Hoang Duong) Nguyen (Miller Fellow 2016-2019) was named a winner of the Eppendorf Award for Young European Investigators 2022.

  • Barry Mazur (Visiting Miller Professor 1992) was awarded with the Chern Medal 2022 "for his profound discoveries in topology, arithmetic geometry and number theory, and his leadership and generosity in forming the next generation of Mathematicians."

  • Ehud Altman (Visiting Miller Professor 2012), Ivan Corwin (Visiting Miller Professor 2021) & Jesse Thaler (Miller Fellow 2006-2009) were named 2022 Simons Investigators in Mathematics and Physical Sciences.

  • 24th Miller Institute's Annual Interdisciplinary Symposium took place on June 3-5, 2022 and was held at the Marconi Conference Center on beautiful Tomales Bay in Marin County, California.

  • John Hartwig (Visiting Miller Professor Fall 2009) was awarded the 2022 Emanuel Merck Lectureship for his outstanding work in transition metal catalysis.

  • Nicolas Mathevon (Visiting Miller Professor Fall 2008) was elected as a member of the Academia Europaea (Academy of Europe.)

  • James Olzmann (Miller Professor 2020-2021) was selected to receive the 2022 Bakar Fellows Spark Award, which is designed to accelerate faculty-led research and produce tangible, positive societal impact through commercialization.

  • Aavishkar Patel (Miller Fellow 2020-2023) is a co-author of the paper "Solvable theory of a strange metal at the breakdown of a heavy Fermi liquid" published in Phys. Rev. B 105, 235111.

  • Miller members Joel Moore (Miller Professor 2011-2012) and Feng Wang (Miller Fellow 2005-2008, Miller Professor 2021-2022) are co-authors of a paper "Imaging gate-tunable Tomonaga–Luttinger liquids in 1H-MoSe2 mirror twin boundaries" published in Nature Materials.

  • James Olzmann (Miller Professor 2020-2021) is a co-author of a paper "Ribosome stalling during selenoprotein translation exposes a ferroptosis vulnerability" published in Nature Chemical Biology.

  • Adair Borges (Miller Fellow 2020-2022) and Jillian Banfield (Miller Professor 2006-2007) are co-authors of "Widespread stop-codon recoding in bacteriophages may regulate translation of lytic genes" published in Nature Microbiology.

  • Feryal Ozel (Visiting Miller Professor 2014, Astronomy, Advisory Board 2017- Present) is part of the Event Horizon Telescope project, a collaboration of more than 300 scientists from 13 institutions that operates an ever-growing global network of telescopes to compose one large telescope as big as Earth. She displayed a first direct image of Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the center of the Milky Way at the National Press Club in Washington, DC.

  • Arun Majumdar (Miller Professor 2003-2004, Mechanical Engineering) was named the inaugural dean of Stanford's new Doerr School of Sustainability. “This new school is a critical part of Stanford’s focus on amplifying our impact in the world."

  • Corrie Moreau (Miller Fellow 2007-2008, Integrative Biology/Environmental Science, Policy & Management) was featured in this new book, "Animal Allies: 15 Amazing Women in Wildlife Science" about women in wildlife science.

  • Miller Members elected to the National Academy of Sciences in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research:

    • Yi Cui (Miller Fellow 2003-2005, Somorjai Visiting Miller Professor 2022))
    • David Drubin (Miller Professor 2021-2022) 
    • Alice Guionnet (Visiting Miller Professor 2006)
    • James Kadonaga (Miller Felllow  1984-1986)
    • Nicole King (Miller Professor 2018-2019)
    • Dana Longcope (Miller Fellow 1993-1995)
    • Chung-Pei Ma (Miller Professor 2010, 2019-2020)
    • Joel Moore (Miller Professor 2011-2012)
    • Eve Ostiker (Visiting Miller Professor 2009)

  • Former Miller Members elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (AAAS): Alice Guionnet (Visiting Miller Professor 2006), Rebecca Heald (Miller Professor 2009-2010), Stephen Mayo (Miller Fellow 1987-1989) & Omar Yaghi (Visiting Miller Professor 2009).

  • Dan Fletcher (Miller Professor 2019-2020) has been named the new Faculty Director for the Blum Center for Developing Economies at UC Berkeley. “My work at the Blum Center is inspired by the Center’s mission to spur innovation, scholarship, and entrepreneurship to improve lives,” said Fletcher.

  • Yao Yang (Miller Fellow 2021-2024) was honored as one of four 2022 AC/DC Rising Stars in Analytical Chemistry.

  • Three former Miller members are among this year’s 180 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellows: Prashant Jain (Miller Fellow 2008 - 2011, Chemistry), Shana Kelley (Somorjai Visiting Miller Professor Fall 2017, Chemistry) & Yong Baek Kim (Visiting Miller Professor Fall 2006, Physics).

  • Yao Yang (Miller Fellow 2021-2024) is a co-author of the paper "A completely precious metal–free alkaline fuel cell with enhanced performance using a carbon-coated nickel anode" published in PNAS.

  • Researchers from the lab of Mikhail Shapiro (Miller Fellow 2011-2013) show how they have developed a specialized strain of the bacteria Escherichia coli (E. coli) that seeks out and infiltrates cancerous tumors when injected into a patient's body. "The goal of this technology is to take advantage of the ability of engineered probiotics to infiltrate tumors, while using ultrasound to activate them to release potent drugs inside the tumor."

  • Adrian Bejan (Miller Fellow 1976-1978) had a brand new book, "Time and Beauty Why Time Flies and Beauty Never Dies" about the physics behind human perceptions (time, beauty, etc.), published by World Scientific.

  • Ekta Patel (Miller Fellow 2019-2022) was featured in the Scientific American article "Women Are Creating a New Culture for Astronomy".

  • The "Erwin Schrödinger Prize - Science Prize of the Stifterverband" for 2021 was awarded to an international team at the Helmholtz Institute Mainz (HIM). "The goal of our scientific work is to provide easy-to-manufacture, safe and long-lived hyperpolarized molecules for medical applications as well as for research purposes," said Dmitry Budker (Miller Professor 2002-2003, 2012). "The impressive research work of this international winning team shows once again what science can achieve when it works together across disciplines and national borders."

  • Raghu Parthasarathy (Miller Fellow 2002-2005) is the author of the newly published book, "So Simple a Beginning: How Four Physical Principles Shape Our Living World" that tells how the emerging new science of biophysics is transforming our understanding of life on Earth and enabling potentially lifesaving but controversial technologies such as gene editing, artificial organ growth, and ecosystem engineering.

  • Alex Filippenko (Miller Senior Fellow 2017-2021, Miller Professor 2005, Miller Professor 1996, Miller Fellow 1984-1986) was awarded the American Astronomical Society 2022 Education Prize “for his passionate and wildly popular teaching of non-science majors; his mentoring of hundreds of teaching assistants and undergraduate research students; his dedication to public education through lectures, TV documentaries, and video courses; his textbook and other popular writings; and his leadership in saving Lick Observatory, a prominent California observatory that faced defunding in 2014.”

  • The inaugural VinFuture Special Prize, dedicated to “Innovators with Outstanding Achievements in Emerging Fields”, is awarded to Omar Yaghi (Visiting Miller Professor 2009) for his work on discovering metal-organic frameworks.

  • Sebastian Höhna (Miller Fellow 2014-2017) was one of the recipients of the prestigious European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grants Award.

  • Jeffrey Townsend (Miller Fellow 2002-2005) is a co-author of the paper "Environmental and sex-specific molecular signatures of glioma causation" published in Neuro-Oncology.

  • William Jackson (Miller Professor 1989) was a 2021 Julius Edgar Lilienfeld Prize Recipient "for outstanding contributions to fundamental chemical physics and spectroscopy associated with asteroids and comets, and for exemplary teaching at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, as well as lifelong service and inspiration to a diverse community."

  • Imke de Pater ((Miller Professor 1993, 2003-2004) leads one of 13 teams given the chance to make early observations with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Given the JWST’s primary mission to study dim, distant galaxies and faint exoplanets, the observations planned by de Pater and her team of about 50 astronomers may seem out of character: They will turn the telescope on one of the brightest objects in the sky, Jupiter.

  • Yu He (Miller Fellow 2019-2022) & Dung-Hai Lee (Miller Professor 1999) are co-authors of the paper, "Unconventional spectral signature of Tc in a pure d-wave superconductor" published in Nature.

  • Jill Banfield (Miller Professor 2006-2007) is a co-author of the paper, "Petabase-scale sequence alignment catalyses viral discovery" published in Nature.

  • Dmitry Budker (Miller Professor 2002-2003, 2012) was a recipient of the 2021 Norman F. Ramsey Prize in Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics, and in Precision Tests of Fundamental Laws and Symmetries "for seminal work studying complex atoms, testing fundamental symmetries of nature, measuring electromagnetic fields, searching for exotic interactions, probing the nature of dark matter, and measuring nuclear magnetic resonance in ultralow fields."

  • Imke de Pater (Miller Professor 1993, 2003-2004) & Chung-Pei Ma (Miller Professor 2010, 2019-2020, Executive Committee 2021) were named 2022 Fellows of the American Astronomical Society for their extraordinary achievements and service!

  • Emily Davis (Miller Fellow 2020-2023) is a co-author of the paper, "Programmable interactions and emergent geometry in an array of atom clouds" published in Nature.

  • UC Berkeley will be home to a new Kavli Center for Ethics, Science, and the Public, which, alongside a second center at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, will connect scientists, ethicists, social scientists, science communicators and the public in necessary and intentional discussions about the potential impacts of scientific discoveries. Stuart Russell (Miller Professor 1996) will direct the new center. In addition to Russell, the Kavli Center leaders include Nobel laureate Saul Perlmutter (Miller Senior Fellow 2010-2015), who provided some of the first evidence that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, and Nobel and Kavli Prize laureate Jennifer Doudna (Miller Senior Fellow 2017), known for her discovery of the gene-editing tool CRISPR, among others.

  • Jillian Banfield (Miller Professor 2006-2007), Adair Borges (Miller Fellow 2020-2023) & Jennifer Doudna (Miller Senior Fellow 2017) are co-authors of the paper, "Species- and site-specific genome editing in complex bacterial communities" published in the journal Nature Microbiology.

  • Eliezer Rabinovici (Visiting Miller Professor Fall 2002) elected as the 24th President of the CERN Council. “Professor Rabinovici is a brilliant theorist in the most advanced fields of research." Professor Rabinovici’s main field of research is theoretical high-energy physics and, in particular, quantum field theory and string theory. He has made major contributions to the understanding of the phase structure of gauge theories, which are the building blocks of the Standard Model, and the uncovering of the phases of gravity.

  • Lou Barreau (Miller Fellow 2018 - Fall 2020) was awarded the 2021 Louis Armand Prize in Chemistry from the French Academy of Sciences for "her studies of the fundamental dynamics of electrons and atoms in molecules..."

  • William Boos (Miller Professor 2021) is a co-author of the article "Mechanical forcing of the North American monsoon by orography" published in Nature.

  • Steven Louie (Miller Professor 1986 - 1987, 1995) and Peidong Yang (Miller Professor 2009) elected Foreign Academicians of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Election to the Academy is one of the highest honors that China bestows on a citizen of a foreign country.

  • Feng Wang (Miller Professor 2021-2022) is a co-author of the paper, "Measuring phonon dispersion at an interface" published in Nature.

  • Ron Cohen (Miller Professor 2015-2016) demonstrated a sensor network he pioneered to provide realtime monitoring of greenhouse gas emissions in cities at the 2021 Climate Summit (COP26) in Glasgow.

  • Norman Yao (Miller Fellow 2014-2017) and colleagues at QuTech reported the creation of a many-body localized discrete time crystal that lasted for about eight seconds in a paper published in the journal Science.

  • Tanja Cuk (Miller Fellow 2007-2010) is a co-author of the paper "Free energy difference to create the M-OH* intermediate of the oxygen evolution reaction by time-resolved optical spectroscopy" published in Nature Materials.

  • Zahid Hasan (Visiting Miller Professor 2017) was awarded a prestigious 2021 Mustafa Prize in the study of science and technology, and for the study of Weyl fermion semimetals, in particular.

  • Naomi Ginsberg (Miller Professor 2017-2018) elected a fellow of the American Physical Society for the "innovative development of spatiotemporally resolved imaging and spectroscopy methods, and for their use in elucidating energy transport in hierarchical and heterogeneous materials, as well as in the formation and transformation of said materials."

  • John Hartwig (Visiting Miller Professor 2009) is one of four senior authors of the study, a collaboration between synthetic chemists and synthetic biologists at the University of California, Berkeley, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, that led to engineering bacteria that can make a molecule that, until now, could only be synthesized in a laboratory. The findings were published online in the journal Nature Chemistry.

  • Shana Kelley (Somorjai Visiting Miller Professor Fall 2017) and Ted Sargent (Somorjai Visiting Miller Professor Fall 2017) join Northwestern’s Department of Chemistry and Department of Biomedical Engineering, and be affiliated with the International Institute for Nanotechnology.

  • David Julius (Miller Institute's 2018 Symposium Speaker) and Ardem Patapoutian were awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for their discoveries of receptors for temperature and touch." David Julius received his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley under the supervision of Professor Emeritus Jeremy Thorner (Miller Professor 1984-1985 and 1999-2000).

  • Feng Wang (Miller Fellow 2005-2008, Miller Professor 2021) is a co-author of this paper "Imaging two-dimensional generalized Wigner crystals" published in Nature.

  • President Biden appointed Saul Perlmutter (Miller Senior Fellow 2010-2015) & Inez Fung (Miller Professor 2016-2017) to the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST). “… Because of their extraordinary intellect, their wide range of experiences and unprecedented diversity, this PCAST will see new possibilities to create good jobs and to power American workers, and grow the economy for everyone. To change the course of human health and disease, to tackle the climate crisis with American innovation, and to lead the world in technologies and industries of the future to protect our security.”

  • Frederick Matsen IV (Miller Fellow 2007-2010) & Mikhail Shapiro (Miller Fellow 2011-2013) are among new cohort of the 2021 HHMI Investigators selected from more than 800 eligible applicants! Frederick Matsen is working on creating computational algorithms to analyze large sets of genetic data from an evolutionary perspective, as well as applying his mathematical wizardry to immunology. Mikhail Shapiro and his team are pioneering a method that uses ultrasound to image and track cells in living animals.

  • Yi Zhang (Miller Fellow 2021-2024) has been awarded the 2021 Peter B. Wagner Memorial Award for Women in Atmospheric Sciences by the Desert Research Institute (DRI) "based on her outstanding research addressing knowledge gaps in model projections of extreme heat in tropical regions.” The Wagner Award recognizes a woman pursuing a graduate education in the atmospheric sciences who has published an outstanding academic paper.

  • Kathleen Collins (Miller Professor Spring 2011, Executive Committee 2014-2015) has been awarded the 2022 Earl and Thressa Stadtman Distinguished Scientist Award from the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB) "for outstanding achievement in basic research. Collins has studied telomerase structure and function for almost three decades."

  • Rebecca Heald (Miller Professor 2009-2010) has been awarded the 2021 American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) Keith R. Porter Lecture. The award is presented annually at the ASCB|EMBO Meeting by an outstanding and innovative leader at the forefront of cell biology, who is actively contributing fundamental new knowledge to our understanding of cell biology.

  • Richmond Sarpong (Miller Professor 2017 - 2018) has been announced as the 2021 Edward Leete awardee from the Division of Organic Chemistry of the American Chemical Society in recognization of his outstanding contributions to teaching and research in organic chemistry.

  • Alison Galvani (Miller Fellow 2002-2004) authored a study that modeled the impact of the United States vaccination program by considering two hypothetical scenarios for caseloads and deaths. The study finds that COVID-19 vaccine rollout has saved 279,000 lives.

  • Norman Yao (Miller Fellow 2014-2017) honored with Breakthrough New Horizons in Physics Prize “for pioneering theoretical work formulating novel phases of non-equilibrium quantum matter, including time crystals.”

  • The 2021 Line and Michel Loève International Prize in Probability is awarded to Ivan Corwin (Visiting Miller Professor Fall 2021.) "Awarded every two years since 1993, it is intended to recognize outstanding contributions by researchers in probability who are under 45 years old."

  • Research collaboration between ExxonMobil’s team and Jeffrey Long's (Miller Professor 2011, 2021-2022) UC Berkeley team led to discovery of a new material that could capture more than 90 percent of CO2 emitted from industrial sources, such as natural gas-fired power plants, using low-temperature steam, requiring less energy for the overall carbon capture process.

  • UC Berkeley’s SSwEET team - Space-Sugar with Electrochemical Energy Technology, led by Peidong Yang (Miller Professor 2009), wins competition to make space sugar.