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Nobel Laureate Frances Hamilton Arnold Presents a Report at Tianjin University

 Global

 

On the morning of October 16th, more than five hundred students and teachers were crowded into a lecture hall at Tianjin University, listening attentively to a science talk given byNobel LaureateProfessor Frances Hamilton Arnold from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).

Frances Hamilton Arnold is an American chemical engineer and Nobel Laureate. She is the Linus Pauling Professor of Chemical Engineering, Bioengineering and Biochemistry at Caltech. In 2018, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for pioneering the use of directed evolution to engineer enzymes.

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Prof. Jay Siegel, Dean of Tianjin University’s School of Pharmaceutical Science and Technology is an old friend of Prof. Arnold. He played a key role in promoting Prof. Arnold’s visit to Tianjin University. “We really appreciate Frances’ coming. She is a wonderful role model for all us here. It’s not only about her academic achievement, but her background, her international experience, her openness and her passion for what she loves.”

During her lecture, Prof. Arnold introduced how the directed evolution strategy was used to create useful biological systems, especially enzymes. By introducing mutations in the underlying sequences of proteins, her research team sped up the enzymes’ evolution and designed proteins well-suited to carry out biological tasks. She said that enzymes had been designed to produce renewable fuels and pharmaceutical compounds with less harm to the environment.

By Eva Yin

Editors: Doris Harrington