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CAROLYN BERTOZZI |
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With a physicist father at MIT
and a mathematician sister at Duke, Carolyn Bertozzi
decided to make her mark in the West. An A.B. summa cum
laude from Harvard, a doctorate from UC Berkeley, and a
postdoctoral fellowship at UC San Francisco preceded her
appointments to UC Berkeley and Berkeley Lab in 1996.
Last year the MacArthur Foundation named her a Fellow—just
one among numerous recognitions of her skills as an
organic chemist working at the frontier of materials and
biology.
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omfortable as they are, today's soft contact lenses are
still foreign objects that can starve the eye of oxygen, dry it out, and
harbor disease organisms. If the cornea and the contact lens are ever going
to coexist, biomimetic materials may be essential - artificial creations
that mimic the remarkable things made by nature.
"Think of wood, soft and light but able to form flexible structures
up to hundreds of feet high," suggests Carolyn Bertozzi, a member
of the Lab's Materials Sciences and Physical Biosciences divisions and
an associate professor of chemistry at the University of California at
Berkeley. "Or think of cartilage, which creates low-friction, shock-absorbing
interfaces between hard and soft parts of the body. Or mucin, stuff that
lubricates membranes and resists microbes at the same time. If we apply
principles of chemistry and engineering to biological inspirations, we
can design new materials rationally, instead of by trial and error."
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