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Photo of Frances Arnold

Frances Arnold

Linus Pauling Professor
Chemical Engineering
Bioengineering and Biochemistry
Caltech
Phone:
+1 626-395-4162
Email:
frances@cheme.caltech.edu
Website:
Website
Twitter Link:
@francesarnold

Research Focus Areas

Research Interests

Development and implementation of powerful methods of laboratory evolution to solve complex design problems, with specific applications in renewable energy, drug discovery and development, and production of chemicals. Combining computational and evolutionary design approaches to create enzymes and microbial catalysts for converting cellulosic biomass to fuels and chemicals.

Distinguished Awards

2018 Nobel Prize in Chemistry
2016 Millennium Technology Prize
2013 National Medal of Technology and Innovation
2011 Draper Prize in Engineering

National Academies 

NAE 2000, NAM 2004, NAS 2008, NAI 2016

News

Displaying 1 - 20 of 39

ICB Supported Publications

Illuminating the universe of enzyme catalysis in the era of artificial intelligence

Jason Yang, Francesca-Zhoufan Li, Yueming Long and Frances H. Arnold
Cell Systems,
10.1016/j.cels.2025.101372

Steering Generative Models with Experimental Data for Protein Fitness Optimization

J. Yang, D. Khalil, B. J. Wittmann, W. Chu, R. Astudillo, F. H. Arnold, Y. Yue
arXiv 39th Conference on Neural Information Processing System (NeurIPS 2025),
10.48550/arXiv.2505.15093

Enzymatic Stereodivergent Synthesis of Azaspiro[2.y]alkanes

Jennifer L. Kennemur, Yueming Long, Catherine J. Ko, Anuvab Das, Frances H. Arnold
Journal of the American Chemical Society,
10.1021/jacs.5c07015

Evaluating Multi-Modal Models for Enzyme-Reaction Retrieval

A. Viswesh, J. Yang, F. H. Arnold, Y. Yue
OpenReview ICML 2025 Workshop on Multi-modal Foundation Models and Large Language Models for Life Sciences,

Active learning-assisted directed evolution

Jason Yang, Ravi G. Lal, James C. Bowden, Raul Astudillo, Mikhail A. Hameedi, Sukhvinder Kaur, Matthew Hill, Yisong Yue and Frances H. Arnold
Nature Communications,
10.1038/s41467-025-55987-8

Catalyzing the future: recent advances in chemical synthesis using enzymes

Julia C. Reisenbauer, Kathleen M. Sicinski and Frances H. Arnold
Current Opinion in Chemical Biology,
10.1016/j.cbpa.2024.102536

Iron heme enzyme-catalyzed cyclopropanations with diazirines as carbene precursors: Computational explorations of diazirine activation and cyclopropanation mechanism

Torben Rogge, Qingyang Zhou, Nicholas J. Porter, Frances H. Arnold, K. N. Houk.
Journal of the American Chemical Society,
10.1021/jacs.3c06030

MicroED structure of a protoglobin reactive carbene intermediate

Emma Danelius, Nicholas J. Porter, Johan Unge, Frances H. Arnold, Tamir Gonen
Journal of the American Chemical Society,
10.1021/jacs.2c12004

Biocatalytic Carbene Transfer Using Diazirines

Nicholas J. Porter, Emma Danelius, Tamir Gonen, and Frances H. Arnold
Journal of the American Chemical Society,
10.1021/jacs.2c02723

Biocatalytic One-Carbon Ring Expansion of Aziridines to Azetidines via a Highly Enantioselective[1,2]-Stevens Rearrangement

David C. Miller, Ravi G. Lal, Luca A. Marchetti and Frances H. Arnold
Journal of American Chemical Society,
10.1021/jacs.2c00251

Combining chemistry and protein engineering for new-to-nature biocatalysis

David C. Miller, Soumitra V. Athavale and Frances H. Arnold
Nature Synthesis,
10.1038/s44160-021-00008-x

Dual-function enzyme catalysis for enantioselective carbon–nitrogen bond formation

Zhen Liu, Carla Calvó-Tusell, Andrew Z. Zhou, Kai Chen, Marc Garcia-Borràs and Frances H. Arnold
Nature Chemistry,
10.1038/s41557-021-00794-z

Navigating the Unnatural Reaction Space: Directed Evolution of Heme Proteins for Selective Carbene and Nitrene Transfer

Yang Yang and Frances H. Arnold
Accounts of Chemical Research,
10.1021/acs.accounts.0c00591

New-to-nature chemistry from old protein machinery: carbene and nitrene transferases

Zhen Liu and Frances H. Arnold
Current Opinion in Biotechnology,
10.1016/j.copbio.2020.12.005

High throughput screening with SAMDI mass spectrometry for directed evolution

Adam J. Pluchinsky, Daniel J. Wackelin, Xiongyi Huang, Frances H. Arnold, Milan Mrksich
Journal of the American Chemical Society,
10.1021/jacs.0c07828

Nature’s Machinery, Repurposed: Expanding the Repertoire of Iron-Dependent Oxygenases

Noah P. Dunham and Frances H. Arnold
ACS Catalysis,
10.1021/acscatal.0c03606

Enzymatic lactone-carbene C-H insertion to build contiguous chiral centers

Andrew Z. Zhou, Kai Chen, and Frances H. Arnold
ACS Catalysis,
10.1021/acscatal.0c01349

Engineering cytochrome P450s for enantioselective cyclopropenation of internal alkynes

Kai Chen and Frances H. Arnold
Journal of the American Chemical Society,
10.1021/jacs.0c01313

Engineering new catalytic activities in enzymes

Kai Chen and Frances H. Arnold
Nature Catalysis,
10.1038/s41929-019-0385-5

Machine learning-guided channelrhodopsin engineering enables minimally invasive optogenetics

Claire N. Bedbrook, Kevin K. Yang, J. Elliott Robinson, Elisha D. Mackey, Viviana Gradinaru, and Frances H. Arnold
Nature Methods,
10.1038/s41592-019-0583-8
Emblems