Commemorating Frances Arnold

Abstract

Frances H. Arnold is the Linus Pauling Professor of Chemical Engineering, Bioengineering, and Biochemistry at the California Institute of Technology, and Director of Caltech’s Rosen Bioengineering Center. Anyone reading this Retrospective probably knows that Frances was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2018 for the directed evolution of enzymes. She is also only the fifth woman to ever win this prize, and the First American woman to win it. The list of Frances’ prior honors and awards is extensive and astounding, and includes elections to the National Academy of Engineering (2000), the National Academy of Medicine (2004), and the National Academy of Sciences (2008) (the first woman to be elected to all three), the 2011 NAE Draper Prize (the first woman to receive it), and the 2016 Millennium Technology Prize (first woman to win). At the time of this writing, Google Scholar reports her co-authored publications receiving over 50,000 citations, with an h-index of 122. She is co-founder of Gevo, Inc. (producing carbon-neutral biofuels) and Provivi (producing environmentally safe biopesticides), and was recently appointed to the board of directors for Alphabet, Inc. (the parent company of Google).