Carolyn R. Bertozzi

Carolyn Ruth Bertozzi (born October 10, 1966) is an American chemist and Nobel laureate, known for her wide-ranging work spanning both chemistry and biology.

She coined the term "bioorthogonal chemistry" for chemical reactions compatible with living systems.

Her recent efforts include synthesis of chemical tools to study cell surface sugars called glycans and how they affect diseases such as cancer, inflammation, and viral infections like COVID-19.

At Stanford University, she holds the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professorship in the School of Humanities and Sciences.

Bertozzi is also an Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) and is the former director of the Molecular Foundry, a nanoscience research center at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

She received the MacArthur "genius" award at age 33.

After graduating from Harvard in 1988, she worked at Bell Labs with Chris Chidsey.

Bertozzi completed her Ph.D. in chemistry at University of California, Berkeley in 1993 with Mark Bednarski, working on the chemical synthesis of oligosaccharide analogs.

While at Berkeley, she discovered that viruses can bind to sugars in the body.

The discovery led to her field of research, glycobiology.

During Bertozzi's third year of graduate school, Bednarski was diagnosed with colon cancer, which resulted in him taking a leave of absence and changing his career path by enrolling in medical school.

This left Bertozzi and the rest of the lab to complete their Ph.D. work with no direct supervision.

After graduating from Berkeley with a Ph.D., Bertozzi was a postdoctoral fellow at University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) with Steven Rosen, where she studied the activity of endothelial oligosaccharides in promoting cell adhesion at inflammation sites.

While working with Rosen at UCSF, Bertozzi was able to modify the protein and sugar molecules in the walls of living cells so that the cells accept foreign materials such as implants.

In 1996 Bertozzi became a faculty member in the UC Berkeley College of Chemistry and a faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where she served as the director of the Molecular Foundry.

In 1999, while working with HHMI and at Berkeley, she founded the field of bioorthogonal chemistry and coined the term in 2003.

This new field and technique allows researchers to chemically modify molecules in living organisms and not interrupt the processes of the cell.

She has been an investigator with HHMI since 2000.

In 2001, Bertozzi and Steve Rosen co-founded Thios Pharmaceuticals in Emeryville, California, the first company to target sulfation pathways.

She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (2005), the Institute of Medicine (2011), and the National Academy of Inventors (2013).

Thios Pharmaceuticals dissolved in 2005.

In 2008, Bertozzi founded a startup of her own: Redwood Bioscience also in Emeryville, California.

Redwood Bioscience is a biotechnology company that uses SMARTag, a site-specific protein modification technology that allows small drugs to attach to sites on the proteins and can be used to help fight cancers.

In 2010, she was the first woman to receive the prestigious Lemelson–MIT Prize faculty award.

In 2014, it was announced that Bertozzi would lead ACS Central Science, the American Chemical Society's first peer-reviewed open access journal, which offers all content free to the public.

Since 2021 she has been a member of the Accademia dei Lincei.

As an open lesbian in academia and science, Bertozzi has been a role model for students and colleagues.

Bertozzi was awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, jointly with Morten P. Meldal and Karl Barry Sharpless, "for the development of click chemistry and bioorthogonal chemistry".

Carolyn Bertozzi received her B.A., summa cum laude, in chemistry from Harvard University, where she worked with Professor Joe Grabowski on the design and construction of a photoacoustic calorimeter.

Grabowski was impressed with her work and required Bertozzi to write a thesis on this project, which was submitted and Bertozzi won the Thomas T. Hoopes Undergraduate Thesis Prize with a large prize money.

While an undergraduate, she played in several bands, notably Bored of Education with future Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello.

In 2015, Bertozzi moved to Stanford University to join the ChEM-H Institute.

Bertozzi studies the glycobiology of underlying diseases such as cancer, inflammatory disorders such as arthritis, and infectious diseases such as tuberculosis.

In particular, Bertozzi has advanced the understanding of cell surface oligosaccharides involved in cell recognition and inter-cellular communication.

Bertozzi has applied the techniques of bioorthogonal chemistry to study glycocalyx, the sugars that surround the cell membrane.

Her discoveries have advanced the field of biotherapeutics.

Her lab has also developed tools for research.

One such development is creating chemical tools for studying glycans in living systems.

In 2017, due to her lab's discovery of linking the sugars on the surface of cancer cells and their ability to avoid the immune system defenses, she was invited to speak at Stanford's TED talk, giving a talk entitled "What the sugar coating on your cells is trying to tell you".

Her lab's development of nanotechnologies which probe biological systems lead to the development of a fast point-of-care tuberculosis test in 2018.