Zuckerman '84 is Facility Director, Biological Nanostructures, at the Molecular Foundary, a  DOE User Facility attached to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory charged with providing support to nanoscience researchers in academic, government and industrial laboratories around the world. He is an international leader in combinatorial drug discovery, a technique that uses an automated parallel synthesis approach to increase the probability of finding novel compounds of therapeutic value for pharmaceutical applications. Zuckerman  graduated from Berkeley High School in Berkeley, Calif., and returned to his hometown to earn a Ph.D. in chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley.

"I am fascinated by the way Nature builds precise 3-dimensional architectures. But can we apply the fundamental principles we learn from protein and nucleic acid structure to man-made polymers? We have developed a new class of bio-inspired polymer called ‘peptoids’, that can be synthesized with remarkable efficiency. We have also developed custom robotic combinatorial library synthesis tools that allow us to explore vast expanses of sequence space very quickly. These technologies have opened up several new areas of exploration in my lab. For example, can we build artificial protein-like nanostructures by linking non-natural building blocks into specific sequences that spontaneously fold into defined tertiary structures? And, can we make huge numbers of sequence variations of such structures and select for sequences that have enzyme-like catalytic activity?"