Judith Klinman


Judith P. Klinman is an American chemist, biochemist, and molecular biologist known for her work on enzyme catalysis. She became the first female professor in the physical sciences at UC Berkeley in 1978. In 2012, she was awarded the National Medal of Science by President Barack Obama.

Education

She earned her A.B. from University of Pennsylvania in 1962 and Ph.D. in physical-organic chemistry from the same university in 1966.

Career

After earning her Ph.D., she completed her postdoctoral training at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel and was a researcher at the Institute for Cancer Research in Philadelphia. In 1974, she joined the University of Pennsylvania as an Assistant Professor of biophysics. In 1978, she moved to University of California, Berkeley as an Associate Professor in Chemistry and later as the chair of the university's Chemistry Department. In 1978 she was the first female faculty member in the physical sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. She is currently the Professor of the Graduate School at the Departments of Chemistry and Molecular and Cell Biology and the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences at the University of California, Berkeley. Her group has discovered that room temperature hydrogen tunneling occurs among various enzymatic reactions, such as enzymatic C-H cleavage, and clarified the dynamics of tunneling process through data analysis. They have also discovered the quino-enzymes, a new class of redox cofactors in eukaryotic enzymes. She also served the Chancellor's Professor for University of California Berkeley. She currently serves as the Professor of the Graduate School.

Honors and awards