Stanford professor Carolyn Bertozzi wins Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Stanford professor Carolyn Bertozzi won the 2022 Nobel Prize in Chemistry early Wednesday morning along with researchers from the University of Copenhagen and Scripps Research for their work developing click chemistry and bioorthogonal chemistry.

Bertozzi, professor of chemistry and director of Sarafan ChEM-H on campus, shares the approximately $1 million award with Morten Meldahl and K. Barry Sharpless Ph.D. ’68. Her research includes mapping cells through bioorthogonal reactions, discoveries that are critical to health innovations including cancer treatment, among other applications.

Bertozzi is Stanford’s 36th Nobel laureate, including econometrics professor Guido Imbens, who won the 2021 Nobel Prize in Economics. In addition to the Nobel Prize being a career-defining achievement, Bertozzi’s win serves as an inspiration for women and queer people in STEM , faculty and students said in interviews. Of the 189 people who won for chemistry, only eight of them were women, including Bertozzi.

“[Eight women] it’s not a big number, but I’m very optimistic because there’s so much talent and I’m lucky enough to be one of the women chosen to share the award this year,” Bertozzi told The Daily. “So now I have a platform that I can use to hopefully, you know, keep that trend going in the right direction.”

Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavin congratulated Bertozzi in a message to the university, as well as in the Stanford report.

“I couldn’t be more pleased that Carolyn Bertozzi has won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry,” he told Stanford News. “As a pioneer in the field of bioorthogonal chemistry, Carolyn invented a new way of studying biomolecular processes that has helped scientists around the world gain a deeper understanding of chemical reactions in living systems.”

Bertozzi grew up in Boston, Massachusetts and later received her AB summa cum laude from Harvard in chemistry in 1988. She completed her Ph.D. in Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley in 1993 and later attended the University of California, San Francisco as a postdoctoral fellow. She joined the UC Berkeley faculty in 1996 and later came to Stanford in 2015.

The win is also an early birthday present for Bertozzi, who will turn 56 on Monday.

Bertozzi said in her interview with them that the Nobel committee member told her, “You have 50 minutes to pull yourself together and wait for your life to change.”

Later, in a morning interview with The Daily outside the Sapp Science Teaching and Learning Center (STLC), Bortezzi conveyed her excitement when she heard the news — she said she first worried the commotion was an indication of chaos, such as the burning down of her lab or a family emergency. But the call turned out to be exciting news.

“I was fast asleep but they called at 1.43am – I have a screenshot on my phone to remember – and the phone was buzzing and buzzing [and it took] little time to wake up, she said. “But then he was the chairman of the Nobel Committee. And then little by little I was like, “Oh my God, this is really happening.”

Bertozzi said the moment felt surreal: “I had to shake my head to make sure it wasn’t a hallucination or some kind of dream or something,” she said. “And [the Nobel Committee was] sharing with me information about what will happen next. Well, I don’t remember anything they said.

Life has been “non-stop” since the announcement, Bertozzi said. Within minutes, Stanford’s communications team was on her doorstep, as well as reporters and photographers from various news organizations. She also completed Zoom interviews with the Associated Press, The Wall Street Journal and The Boston Globe. (Bertozzi said visiting The Globe was special — she’s from Massachusetts.)

Bertozzi’s victory was celebrated by many on campus, including colleagues and friend Sharon Long, a biology professor at Stanford. The two have known each other since Bertozzi’s time as a postdoctoral fellow in San Francisco. There, Long’s lab investigated “a process of bacterial biosynthesis that involves sulfation, while [Bertozzi] analyzed the importance of sulfation on the surface glycan of mammalian cells.

“Reading a lot outside her field, she saw that one of our enzymes might be a useful reagent,” Long said in an email. “Even as a postdoctoral fellow, she has already demonstrated the creativity, imagination and experimental fearlessness that characterize all of her work. She can see the really important questions, and if there is no way to answer them, she will come up with a new approach so that critical experiments become possible.

Members of Bertozzi’s lab also praised the win, including a fifth-year chemistry Ph.D. student Gabby Tender and sixth-year Ph.D. in Chemistry. student Green Ahn. Laboratory research “research at the frontier of chemistry and biology will yield new drugs and diagnostics that improve human health, technologies to explore natural biology, and roadmaps to create synthetic life forms designed to serve human needs.”

Ann said Bertozzi’s kindness has left an imprint on the lab — Bertozzi is “incredibly supportive and always gives huge credit to her mentees,” Ann said.

“Training in her lab enables her mentees to become independent scientists after their time in the lab,” added Anne. “Her pursuit of using chemistry to impact human health inspires us all.”

Tender said that as a woman in the lab, she appreciates not only Bertozzi’s commitment to science in the group, but also “her commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion.”

“Like a weird Ph.D. student in her lab, Carolyn has been a longtime personal and scientific role model of mine,” said Tender. “She gave talks about her personal and professional experiences to young queer scholars on campus, making many of us feel both supported and heard.”