Frances Arnold

Frances Hamilton Arnold is an internationally recognized American chemical engineer and Nobel Laureate. Arnold serves as the Linus Pauling Professor of Chemical Engineering, Bioengineering, and Biochemistry at the California Institute of Technology. In 2018, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for pioneering the use of directed evolution to engineer enzymes. Since January 2021, she has been an external co-chair of President Joe Biden's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST).

Arnold has used directed evolution to design highly specific and efficient enzymes that can be used as environmentally friendly alternatives to some industrial chemical synthesis procedures. She and others using her methods have engineered enzymes that can carry out synthesis reactions more quickly, with fewer by-products, and in some cases eliminating the need for hazardous heavy metals. At Caltech, Arnold runs a laboratory that continues to study directed evolution and its applications in environmentally friendly chemical synthesis and green/alternative energy, including the development of highly active enzymes (cellulolytic and biosynthetic enzymes) and microorganisms to convert renewable biomass to fuels and chemicals.

In addition to the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, Arnold has received many awards for her work. She was the first woman to receive the Draper Prize and win the Millennium Technology Prize. She was also the first woman to be elected to all three National Academies in the United States - the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Medicine, and the National Academy of Sciences. Arnold was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014.

Arnold studied mechanical and aerospace engineering at Princeton University, where she focused on solar energy research. She studied at Princeton's Center for Energy and Environmental Studies, a group of scientists and engineers working to develop sustainable energy sources. The topic would later become the focus of her work. After graduating Princeton, she worked as an engineer at Colorado's Solar Energy Research Institute (now the National Renewable Energy Laboratory) where she worked on designing solar energy facilities for remote locations and helped write United Nations position papers. She then continued her studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where she earned a doctorate in chemical engineering and became interested in biochemistry.