Professor Judith P. Klinman, chair of UC Berkeley’s Department of Chemistry, was selected as the first David Sigman Memorial Lecturer at UCLA’s Molecular Biology Institute. This new award, to be presented annually, recognizes outstanding researchers in the area of chemical biology, where the complexity of life is investigated at the level of individual molecules.

Klinman was honored for two groundbreaking discoveries in enzymology: the importance of protein-bound quinone cofactors and hydrogen tunneling mechanisms in enzyme catalysis. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and recently served as the president of the American Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. She was the first female faculty member in the physical sciences at UC Berkeley, and is the first female chair of the Department of Chemistry there.

Klinman’s lecture was part of a symposium at UCLA entitled “New Vistas in Chemical Biology: A Tribute to David Sigman.� Other speakers included professors David R. Liu of Harvard, David Perrin of the University of British Columbia and Arthur Horwich of Yale.

The Sigman Lectureship Award was established in 2002 to honor the memory of David Sigman, a professor in the UCLA Department of Biological Chemistry and in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, and a charter member and associate director of the UCLA Molecular Biology Institute. He was a leader in the field of chemical biology at UCLA and discovered chemical nucleases in a career that illuminated the molecular mechanisms of catalysis.

A permanently endowed fund for the annual award was made possible by contributions from more than 200 of Sigman’s colleagues, friends and family, as well as corporate donations from the Amgen Foundation, Eli Lilly and Co., the Bristol-Myers Squibb Foundation and Raytheon Systems Co.