Professor Carolyn R. Bertozzi, University of California, Berkeley, USA, will receive this year’s Emanuel Merck Lectureship. With this, Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany, and Technical University Darmstadt, recognize globally renowned scientists who have made superb contributions to chemical and pharmaceutical research. The prize, which is worth € 10,000, was presented to Bertozzi on November 14, at the TU Darmstadt where she will give a special public lecture on the chemistry of living systems. Bertozzi will hold further lectures at the TU Darmstadt and at Merck on the 15th and 16th of November.

Carolyn Bertozzi studied at Harvard University, Massachusetts, USA, and completed her Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1993. After working for three years at the University of California, San Francisco, USA, she joined the UC Berkeley faculty in 1996. She conducts research on intercellular communication by studying cell surface oligosaccharides. To this end, she and her research group introduce individual molecules, chemical reporters, into cell systems in order to study cell-cell interactions. She is an international advisory board member of Angewandte Chemie.

• Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany
• Carolyn Bertozzi’s homepage

See also the recent review:

• Bioorthogonal Chemistry: Fishing for Selectivity in a Sea of Functionality
  E. M. Sletten, C. R. Bertozzi,
  Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2009, 48(38), 6974–6998.
  DOI: 10.1002/anie.200900942