Caroline Bertozzi

Carolyn Ruth Bertozzi (English: Carolyn Ruth Bertozzi; born October 10, 1966), American chemist, member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Inventors, the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, and the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University. In addition, Bertosi is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and former director of Molecular Foundry, the Nanoscience Research Center at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Known for his extensive work spanning chemistry and biology. She coined the term "bioorthogonal chemistry" to refer to chemical reactions that are compatible with living systems. Her recent work includes synthesizing chemical tools to study cell surface sugars called glycans and how they impact diseases such as cancer, inflammation, and viral infections like COVID-19. She received a MacArthur Genius Grant at the age of 33. In 2010, she became the first woman to receive the Lemelson-MIT Prize. In 2014, Bertosi became editor-in-chief of ACS Central Science, the American Chemical Society's first peer-reviewed open-access journal, whose entire content is freely available to the public. Since 2021 she is a member of the National Academy of Sciences of the Italian Lynx Eye. As an openly lesbian woman in academia and science, Bertozzi has been a role model to students and colleagues. In 2022, she won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry together with Carl Barry Sharpless and Morten Meirdahl for their outstanding contributions to bioorthogonal chemistry and click chemistry.