• Dr. Wilson Francisco, associate professor, received tenure this fall. He joined the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry in August, 1999. His research interests include enzyme mechanisms and catalysis, enzymology, molecular biology, and protein crystallography.
• Dr. Don Seo was promoted to associate professor with tenure. He joined the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry in August 2001. His research interests are inorganic solid-state materials, half-metals, magnetoresistive materials, quantum dots and theoretical modeling.
• Dr. Rebekka Wachter was also promoted to associate professor with tenure. She joined the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry in August 2001. She works in protein post-translational modifications, macromolecular x-ray crystallography, protein-based chromophores and enzyme mechanisms.

Three Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry faculty members recently received the Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation. Currently, there six active awardees in the department.

• Dr. Julian (Jiunn-Liang) Chen‘s research focuses on understanding the structure-function relationship and evolution of a unique RNA-protein enzyme, called telomerase, which maintains the genomic stability in eukaryotic cells. With the support of this five-year, $670,000 grant, Dr. Chen will develop a research and education program in the area of telomerase evolution and regulation.
• Dr. Marcia Levitus’ s research concentrates on the application of single-molecule spectroscopic techniques to advance the understanding of biomolecular processes. With the support of this five- year, $568,000 grant, Dr. Levitus and her research team will seek to gain a deeper quantitative understanding of the simplest biological components of chromatin: double stranded DNA and nucleosomes.
• Dr. Ulrich Häussermann’s CAREER project focuses on a new family of main group metal hydrides, termed polyanionic hydrides, which exhibit unforeseen coordination environments and bonding situations for hydrogen. With this five-year, $500,000 grant, a research program was developed which addresses the exploration of the compositional range of these materials by different methods of synthesis, their structure and property characterization, as well as their spectroscopic investigation.

• Sandra Pizzarello's article was featured by the American Chemical Society as most cited in 2006.
  
  
• Austen Angell received the David Turnbull Lectureship Award from the American Materials Research Society, December 2006.
  
  
• Hao Yan received the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) Young Investigators Research Award, February 2007.
  
  
• Ron Briggs received the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Dean's Distinguished Teaching Award, spring 2007.
  
  
• Joseph Wang was awarded honorary professor degrees from Complutense University of Madrid (Spain’s largest university), and the National Institute of Chemistry in Ljubljana, Slovenia, summer 2007.
  
  
• Everett Shock was selected as the H. Burr Steinbach Visiting Scholar for The Massachusetts Institute of Technology/Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (MIT-WHOI), September 2007.

• Yan Liu accepted the position of assistant professor of the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry effective fall semester 2007.

Dr. Liu has been an assistant research professor in the ASU Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry and the Biodesign institute since 2004. She graduated from Columbia University with a Ph.D. in chemistry in 2000, and held a postdoctoral associate position at Rockefeller University 2000-2001 and Duke University 2001-2004, before coming to ASU. Her research program is highly interdisciplinary which combines chemistry, biology, physics and material science. The goal is to develop nanoparticle based multi-component and multi-functional nanostructures using self-assembly and DNA directed self-assembly, to characterize their unique optical properties, and explore their applications in bio-imaging, biosensing, etc.

• Alexandra Ros has been hired as an assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry. Her career at ASU begins in the spring semester of 2008.

Dr. Ros comes to ASU from Bielefeld University, Germany. She started her studies at the Technical University Munich, graduated from Ruprecht-Karls-University Heidelberg with a diploma in chemistry in 1995 and completed her Ph.D. from the Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland in 2000. In the same year she moved to Bielefeld University and held a postdoctoral position in the Experimental Biophysics and Applied Nanoscience Group. Since 2001 she has been the principal investigator of several German National Science Foundation funded projects. In July 2007 she obtained her Habilitation License, which allows her to teach at German universities.