Biography

Michelle C. Chang earned a B.Sc. in Biochemistry and in French Literature at the University of California in San Diego in 1997. This was followed by research as a National Science Foundation Predoctoral Fellow from 1997 to 2000 and as a M.I.T./Merck Foundation Predoctoral Fellow between 2000-2002. In 2004 she obtained her Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with Professor JoAnne Stubbe and Professor Daniel G. Nocera. After a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley, she joined the faculty where she is currently working as an Associate Professor at the Department of Chemistry.
Michelle C. Chang laboratory utilizes the approaches of mechanistic biochemistry, molecular and cell biology, metabolic engineering, and synthetic biology to address problems in energy and human health. Her group designs and creates new biosynthetic pathways in microbial hosts for in vivo production of biofuels from abundant crop feedstocks and pharmaceuticals from natural products or natural product scaffolds.
Her honors and awards include Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation New Faculty Award (2007), Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation Young Investigator Award (2008), Technology Review TR35 Young Innovator Award (2008), BayBio Rising Star Award (2008), NSF, CAREER (2009), Agilent Early Career Award (2010), Hellman Foundation Faculty Award (2010), American Chemical Society-Sociedade Brasileira de Química Young Talents in Science Award (2011), NIH New Innovator Award (2011), DARPA Young Faculty Award (2012), Iota Sigma Pi Agnes Fay Morgan Award (2012), Paul Saltman Award in Bioinorganic Chemistry (2013), 3M Young Faculty Award (2013), Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award (2013).