UCSD Chem Biochem

Congratulations to all of our outstanding graduate students who received a Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation! @NSF 🎉

Congrats to @UCSDChemBiochem prof Fleur Ferguson on receiving the Philip S. Portoghese Early Career Award for the Advancement of Medicinal Chemistry from @AmerChemSociety, which recognizes exceptional scientists whose research is reshaping their fields. bit.ly/4djorVd

Congrats to @UCSDChemBiochem's Fleur Ferguson on receiving a 2026 @PershingSqFdn Sohn Cancer Prize. The grants are designed to empower investigators early in their independent careers, enabling them to pursue their most bold and high-impact projects. ow.ly/Mpfw50YXONJ

Congratulations to @UCSDChemBiochem alumna @cancelada_lucia on being named a 2026 Schmidt Science Fellow. As a fellow, Lucia will explore how tiny ocean microbes help lock away carbon for centuries. Meet this year's cohort: bit.ly/4e9oXFP @SchmidtFellows

🎉 Congratulations to Prof. Shaowei Li on receiving an @NSF #CAREER Award! 🎉 This prestigious recognition supports his work on controlling single-molecule reactivity, which opens new possibilities for directing chemical processes with atomic precision. @UCSanDiego @UCSDPhySci

Congratulations to @UCSDChemBiochem Professor Vicki Grassian on being named the John Dove Isaacs Endowed Chair in Natural Philosophy for Physical Sciences! 🎉

Congratulations to Prof. Seth Cohen on his appointment as Dean of Physical Sciences at @UCIrvine! 🎉 We are proud to see one of our own take on this important leadership role. While we will miss him at @UCSanDiego, we look forward to seeing the impact he will have at @UCIrvine.

🚨 Our Perspective on #supercooled #water is now out in @ScienceMagazine! 👉 science.org/doi/10.1126/sc… More than 10 years ago, we introduced our #datadriven #manybody formalism to develop transferable potentials with chemical accuracy, starting with #water and leading to MB-pol. Since then, MB-pol has been used to model #water across all phases, from the gas-phase dimer 🫧 to the liquid 🌊 and ice 🧊, consistently reproducing experimental data. But our goal was never just agreement with experiment. We wanted to make predictions that experiments could test. Last year, we predicted the location of #water. ⚡️ Today, new measurements infer a location remarkably close to our prediction. 😎 A very exciting moment for #datadriven #manybody potentials! 🚀 Big thanks to @NSF, @ENERGY, and @AFOSR for supporting the development and applications of MB-pol over the years! @UCSDPhySci @UCSDChemBiochem @HDSIUCSD @SDSC_UCSD 1/2

A great night at the @AmerChemSociety National Meeting in Atlanta! 🎉 Congratulations to Prof. Tezcan (Bader Award) and Prof. Figueroa (Cotton Award) on these well-deserved honors. Proud to see their work recognized at the highest level of our field! 👏 @UCSanDiego @UCSDPhySci

#BaseEditing is still a relatively new #biotechnology. Researchers are working to improve its efficiency, while lowering the incidence of unwanted bystander edits. @KomorLab has developed a new tool to do this. Their work appears in @NatureBiotech. bit.ly/47IKYHB

Congrats to Fleur Ferguson on receiving the Medicinal Chemistry Emerging Investigator Lectureship from the Royal Society of Chemistry. She was recognized for making significant contributions in the fields of medicinal chemistry and drug discovery. bit.ly/3NbDTbL

Haiwang Yong lives in the ultrafast lane. He uses #UltrafastSpectroscopy to observe the motion of atoms and electrons in femtoseconds. Last year, Yong received an @ENERGY award and a grant from the W.M. Keck Foundation to support his work. bit.ly/4seZLlu @UCSDChemBiochem

🚨 New paper out in @JPhysChem Lett.! 🚨 We're excited to share our latest work (a collaboration with @BonnMischa's group at @mpi_polymer): 👉 pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/ac… At the #air/#water interface, "free" (dangling) O–H groups are responsible for a sharp peak at ~3700 cm⁻¹ in the vibrational sum-frequency generation (#vSFG) spectrum.⚡️ Because it’s so narrow, it’s often treated as spectrally #homogeneous. But is it really? 🌊 In this study, we combine: ✅ Three distinct polarization‑resolved heterodyne‑detected #vSFG measurements, reporting the first #SPS spectrum. ✅ Our #datadriven #manybody MB-pol potential for predictive simulations. ✅ Path‑integral-based quantum dynamics (Te‑PIGS) simulations to capture #NuclearQuantumEffects. Our key findings: 🎯 The free O–H peak shifts with polarization by ~13–15 cm⁻¹ → direct evidence that *orientation matters* even for “free” O–H. 🎯 Free O–H bonds tilted toward the interfacial plane are systematically red‑shifted compared to more upright O–H. 🎯 Mechanism: orientation‑dependent *local electric fields* from neighboring water molecules. Stronger projected fields along the O–H axis correlate with lower (red‑shifted) fundamental frequencies. Take‑home message: 🔎 A sharp peak ≠ a uniform interface. The #water surface is intrinsically heterogeneous, and polarization‑resolved spectroscopy + quantum many‑body simulations can read out that heterogeneity in terms of local electric fields. Huge congrats to #Richa for leading this project! 🙌 🙏 Big thanks to @NSF for funding and to @ACCESSforCI and @NERSC for providing computational resources! @UCSanDiego @UCSDPhySci @UCSDChemBiochem @HDSIUCSD @SDSC_UCSD

Congrats to UC San Diego's newest Sloan Research Fellows, including @Mattia__Serra and Fleur Ferguson. The fellowships acknowledge researchers whose innovation and research accomplishments set them apart as the next generation of leaders. bit.ly/4rgWsK8 @SloanFoundation

Huge congratulations to Prof. Shaowei Li and team on their @ScienceMagazine paper! 🎉 Single-molecule infrared spectroscopy with STM captures vibrational modes with atomic precision, opening a new era in bond-specific chemistry. @UCSanDiego @UCSDPhySci science.org/eprint/INVDJBZ…

🚨 New paper out in @JPhysChem Lett.! 🚨 We are excited to share our latest work: 👉 pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/ac… Interfacial #water behaves very differently from bulk #water. 🌊 At charged interfaces, interpreting vibrational sum-frequency generation (#vSFG) spectra becomes particularly challenging. ⚡️ The key question is: 🤔 What is truly “surface-specific” (χ²), and what originates from bulk field-induced contributions (χ³)? In this study, we combine: ✅ Our #datadriven #manybody MB-pol potential ✅ Temperature-elevated path-integral coarse-graining (Te-PIGS) to include #NuclearQuantumEffects ✅ Layer-resolved heterodyne-detected #vSFG simulations to provide a molecular-level separation of χ² and χ³ contributions at charged graphene oxide/water (#GO/#water) interfaces Our findings: 🎯 The prominent ~3200 cm⁻¹ band observed experimentally is not primarily surface-specific. It is dominated by field-induced bulk χ³ mixing associated with the electrical double layer. 🎯 In contrast, the strictly interfacial structure is encoded in χ². 🎯 This explicit χ²/χ³ decomposition clarifies how surface and bulk responses combine to shape measured #vSFG spectra at charged aqueous interfaces. Beyond #GO, this framework provides a general strategy to interpret vibrational spectra at charged and nanoconfined aqueous interfaces, with implications for: • Membrane science • Electrochemical systems • Sensing platforms • Interfacial reactivity Congratulations to #Toheeb and #Richa for leading this exciting collaboration between our groups at @UCSanDiego and @LSU! 🙌 Excited to see how heterodyne #vSFG experiments will further test these predictions. 🚀 @UCSDPhySci @UCSDChemBiochem @HDSIUCSD @SDSC_UCSD @LSU_Chemistry

Congratulations!

🔋 New work from @KentJGriffith reveals lithium and sodium intercalation with multielectron redox in vacancy-ordered and vacancy-disordered cation-deficient materials, advancing our understanding of next-generation electrodes. @UCSanDiego @UCSDPhySci pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/ja…

.@UCSDChemBiochem's Wei Wang has mapped the genetic programs that determine the behavior of powerful white blood cells, called CD8 killer T cells, which are critical for controlling infections and fighting cancer. This work appears in @Nature. bit.ly/4tnQyZo

#GeneTherapy holds the promise of curing disease, but to work the new gene must make it into a cell’s nucleus—a difficult task. Neal Devaraj’s lab at @UCSDChemBiochem presents a method that raises gene delivery efficacy while minimizing side effects. bit.ly/4r8GkKU