Undergraduate Students
Zach Goldstein, undergraduate student, 2021.
Emily Marquez, FLAM summer research student from Cal State Long Beach, 2021. Current: graduate student, Northwestern University
Kristina Shi, undergraduate student, 2021-2022.
Juan Huerta, undergraduate student, 2021-2022.
Deanna Bustos, FLAM summer research student from New Mexico Highlands University, 2022.
Lida Cheng, undergraduate student, 2021-2023. Current: graduate student, Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Harvard University
Yunlong Zhao, undergraduate student, 2020-2023. Current: graduate student, Department of Chemistry, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
During his time with us, Yunlong was a Chemistry major in the College of Creative Studies at UC Santa Barbara. Yunlong received the Robert H. DeWolfe Undergraduate Research Award (2020) and the Willard L. McRary Prize (2022), the highest honor for undergraduate students from Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry. In the lab, Yunlong first worked with Dr. Wenzhen Fu and completed two projects with Wenzhen. Yunlong is also the first student in our group to work on machine learning-guided enzyme engineering.
Benjamin Krohn-Hansen, undergraduate student. Current: graduate student at UC Berkeley.
Graduate Students
Dr. Michael Chin, Ph.D. in Chemistry, University of California Santa Barbara, 2020-2024
Postdoctoral Scholars
Dr. Qi Zhou, postdoctoral scholar, 2020-2022.
Current: assistant professor, Institute of Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China
Qi received his PhD in Organic Chemistry with Prof. Jianbo Wang from Peking University. In our group, Qi is the first lab member to work on our metalloredox radical biocatalysis project. He published the first paper of our group in this field (Science 2021). He also continued to push the boundaries of P450 atom transfer radical cyclases afterwards. In 2023, Qi is awarded a prestigious junior faculty fellowship to start his independent career at the Institute of Chemistry, CAS.
Dr. Dian Li, postdoctoral scholar, 2022-2023.
Dr. Shuyun Ju, postdoctoral scholar, 2020-2023.
Current: assistant professor, Zhejiang University of Science and Technology, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China
Shuyun received his PhD in Chemical Engineering and Technology from Zhejiang University under the direction of Prof. Jianping Wu. While in the Wu lab, Shuyun studied biocatalysis and biotransformation. He also developed biocatalytic redox approaches for the asymmetric synthesis of chiral carboxyl-substituted tetrahydroisoquinolines. During his time with us, Shuyun pioneered two new directions in our group and published two papers with us. He is the first one to work on methyltransferases (Nat. Comm. 2023). He is also the first to collaborate with the Valentine lab on fatty acid photodecarboxylases (Nat. Chem. 2024).
Dr. Wenzhen Fu, postdoctoral scholar, 2020-2024; project scientist, 2024.
Current: assistant professor, China Pharmaceutical University, Nanjing, China
Wenzhen received his PhD from the Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry under the direction of Prof. Wenjun Tang. Wenzhen’s graduate research focused on the development of novel chiral phosphine ligands for Ni-catalyzed asymmetric reductive couplings. Prior to UCSB, Wenzhen was a postdoctoral researcher working with Prof. Marcus Tius and Prof. James Turkson at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.
Wenzhen is one of the first two people joining our group. During his time with us, he pioneered biocatalytic radical functionalization reactions of arenes. His work on aromatic substitution reactions and dearomatization reactions resulted in papers in Nat. Catal. (2023) and Nat. Chem. (2024). He is also the first lab coordinator of our group, making contributions to many aspects of our daily life.