Frances Arnold

Frances H. Arnold is the Dick and Barbara Dickinson Professor of Chemical Engineering, Bioengineering and Biochemistry at the California Institute of Technology. She is known for her pioneering work in the directed evolution of biological molecules. Arnold has more than 30 U.S. patents and has served as science advisor to a number of biotech companies, including Amyris, Codexis, Mascoma, and Gevo, a company she co-founded in 2005 to make fuels and chemicals from renewable resources. Among her many awards, the most recent is the 2011 Charles Stark Draper Prize of the National Academy of Engineering. She also served as a judge for the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering in 2013. She has been elected to all three U.S. National Academies—the National Academy of Engineering (2000), the Institute of Medicine (2004), and the National Academy of Sciences (2008). She is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Most recently, Mrs. Arnold won the 2018 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.