Event Contact

Speaker Information

Professor Carlos Bustamante from UC Berkeley is the Inaugural Speaker for the new Armendarez Seminar Series, which is hosted by Chem-DEI with support from the Packard Foundation. 

He is a professor of Molecular and Cell Biology, Physics, and Chemistry, and the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Chair of Biophysics at University of California, Berkeley. He is also a biophysics faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. Carlos Bustamante is interested in the dynamics and mechanochemical properties of molecular motors such as the packaging motor of bacteriophage Phi 29 and the operation of RNA polymerase and the ribosome during transcription and translation, respectively. In particular, his laboratory is investigating the physical basis of transcription regulation by the nucleosomal barrier. His laboratory is also interested in the process of protein folding and, more specifically, the co-translational folding of nascent polypeptides. To this end, Bustamante and his team develop and apply novel methods of single-molecule manipulation and detection, such as optical tweezers, magnetic tweezers, and single-molecule fluorescence microscopy.