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Chang named among TR35’s 2008 Top Young Innovators! |
September 2008 -
Each year the editors of Technology Review honor the young innovators whose inventions and research they find most exciting with inclusion on the TR35. This list honors technologists and scientists under the age of 35 whose work--spanning medicine, computing, communications, electronics, nanotechnology, and more--is changing the world. Michelle Chang, Assistant Professor of Chemistry at Berkeley and member of the UCBerkeley/UCSF Graduate Group in Bioengineering, has landed herself a spot in the list with her work designing microbes to make fuels and drugs.
Organisms that live in exotic environments have evolved unique traits in order to survive. Chang hijacks the chemical reactions that confer those traits, combining them in novel ways. By inserting borrowed genes into easy-to-grow microbes such as E. coli, she creates organisms with new abilities.
While her projects have important practical applications, Chang hopes that her work will lead to basic tools for engineering organisms that can perform all kinds of reactions that are too difficult, expensive, or dangerous with traditional chemistry.
Read full article at TechnologyReview.com. |
