32 Facts About Frances Arnold

Frances Hamilton Arnold was born on July 25,1956 and is an American chemical engineer and Nobel Laureate.

Frances Arnold is the Linus Pauling Professor of Chemical Engineering, Bioengineering and Biochemistry at the California Institute of Technology.

Frances Arnold grew up in the Pittsburgh suburb of Edgewood, and the Pittsburgh neighborhoods of Shadyside and Squirrel Hill, graduating from the city's Taylor Allderdice High School in 1974.

Frances Arnold applied as a mechanical engineering major and was accepted.

Frances Arnold graduated in 1979 with a Bachelor of Science degree in mechanical and aerospace engineering from Princeton University, where she focused on solar energy research.

Frances Arnold took a year off from Princeton after her second year to travel to Italy and work in a factory that made nuclear reactor parts, then returned to complete her studies.

Frances Arnold then enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, where she earned a Ph.

Frances Arnold had no chemistry background before pursuing a doctorate in chemical engineering.

Frances Arnold was promoted to assistant professor in 1986, associate professor in 1992, and full professor in 1996.

Frances Arnold was a member of the Advisory Board of the Joint BioEnergy Institute.

Frances Arnold served on the President's Advisory Council of the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology.

In 2000 Frances Arnold was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering for integration of fundamentals in molecular biology, genetics, and bioengineering to the benefit of life science and industry.

Frances Arnold has been on the corporate board of the genomics company Illumina Inc since 2016.

Frances Arnold is working with Biden's transition team to help identify scientists for roles in the administration.

Frances Arnold says her main job now is to help choose PCAST's additional members and to get to work setting a scientific agenda for the group.

Frances Arnold carried out the work using four sequential rounds of mutagenesis of the enzyme's gene, expressed by bacteria, through error-prone PCR.

Frances Arnold selected the bacteria that had the biggest halos and isolated their DNA for further rounds of mutagenesis.

Frances Arnold has further developed her methods and applied them under different selection criteria in order to optimize enzymes for different functions.

Frances Arnold showed that, whereas naturally evolved enzymes tend to function well at a narrow temperature range, enzymes could be produced using directed evolution that could function at both high and low temperatures.

Frances Arnold has used directed evolution to design highly specific and efficient enzymes that can be used as environmentally-friendly alternatives to some industrial chemical synthesis procedures.

Frances Arnold uses structure-guided protein recombination to combine parts of different proteins to form protein chimeras with unique functions.

Frances Arnold developed computational methods, such as SCHEMA, to predict how the parts can be combined without disrupting their parental structure, so that the chimeras will fold properly, and then applies directed evolution to further mutate the chimeras to optimize their functions.

Frances Arnold was married to James E Bailey who died of cancer in 2001.

Frances Arnold was herself diagnosed with breast cancer in 2005 and underwent treatment for 18 months.

Lange committed suicide in 2010 and one of their sons, William Lange-Frances Arnold, died in an accident in 2016.

Frances Arnold's hobbies include traveling, scuba diving, skiing, dirt-bike riding, and hiking.

Frances Arnold was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2011 and inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014.

Frances Arnold is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Microbiology, the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering and an International Fellow of the UK's Royal Academy of Engineering in 2018.

In 2017, Frances Arnold was awarded the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Prize in Convergence Research by the National Academy of Sciences, which recognizes extraordinary contributions to convergence research.

Frances Arnold portrayed herself in the 18th episode "The Laureate Accumulation" of the 12th season of the TV series The Big Bang Theory.

Frances Arnold appeared in a brief interview in the NOVA episode Beyond the Elements: Life.

Frances Arnold was interviewed by Jim Al-Khalili on the BBC's The Life Scientific on 6 September 2022.