Professor Emeritus
University of California Berkeley
Chris Somerville was a professor at UC Berkeley, Stanford University, the Carnegie Institution for Science, Michigan State University, and the University of Alberta. He published more than 250 research papers in biochemistry and cell and molecular biology. His work was largely focused on elucidating the mechanisms by which the major storage and structural components of plants and bacteria were synthesized, and, in recent years, he also studied how such components could be depolymerized for use as feedstocks and synthons for production of fuels and chemicals. He was an early advocate for the use of Arabidopsis as a model organism and was an organizer of the international collaboration that sequenced the Arabidopsis genome. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society of London. He now works in a philanthropy that supports basic and applied scientific research.
Friday, July 31, 2020
12:10 PM – 12:40 PM EDT