Christopher Chang

Christopher J. Chang is an American chemist and the Edward and Virginia Taylor Professor of Bioorganic Chemistry at Princeton University. Previously, he was a professor of chemistry and of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley, where he holds the Class of 1942 Chair. Chang is also a member of the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, adjunct professor of pharmaceutical chemistry at the University of California, San Francisco, and faculty scientist at the chemical sciences division of Lawrence Berkeley Lab. He is the recipient of several awards for his research in bioinorganic chemistry, molecular and chemical biology.

His research interests include molecular imaging sensors for the study of redox biology and metals, especially as applied to neuroscience and immunology, metal catalysts for renewable energy cycles, and green chemistry.

Early life and education

Chang was born in 1974 in Ames, Iowa, and was raised in Indiana. He attended the California Institute of Technology for his undergraduate degree, where he studied chemistry. At Caltech, he worked with Harry B. Gray on the synthesis and characterization of metal salen complexes of manganese and vanadium, and nitrogen and oxygen transfer reactivity with these complexes, respectively. Chang earned his BS and MS in chemistry in 1997, after which he worked in the laboratory of Jean-Pierre Sauvage at the Université Louis Pasteur as a Fulbright Fellow. In 1999, he moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a NSF/Merck Graduate Fellow.