Alanna Schepartz is the C.Z. and Irmgard Chu Distinguished Chair in the departments of Chemistry and Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research group studies the chemistry and biology of complex cellular machines and exploits this knowledge to design or discover molecules–both small and large–with unique or useful properties. Dr. Schepartz obtained her undergraduate education in chemistry at the State University of New York, Albany. She earned a Ph.D. from Columbia University under the direction of Ronald Breslow and spent two years as an NIH Postdoctoral Fellow at Caltech working with Peter Dervan. Professor Schepartz joined the faculty at Yale in 1988 and was named a Sterling Professor, Yale's highest faculty honor, in 2017. In 2019 Professor Schepartz and her laboratory moved to the University of California, Berkeley. Her honors include a Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering, an NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award, the Eli Lilly Award in Biological Chemistry, an ACS Cope Scholar Award, the ACS Chemical Biology Prize, the Ralph F. Hirschmann Award in Peptide Chemistry, the Ronald Breslow Award for Achievement in Biomimetic Chemistry, the Frank H. Westheimer Prize, and the Wheland Medal. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences.