F. Akif Tezcan

Akif Tezcan is a bioinorganic chemist, Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry and Leslie Orgel Faculty Scholar at UCSD. His research group at UCSD focuses on developing chemical tools and strategies to study biological nitrogen fixation, to design functional proteins and enzymes, and to create new biological materials.

Akif was educated at the German High School in Istanbul and then at Macalester College in St. Paul, MN, where he majored in chemistry and biology, and conducted research on the rotational dynamics of transitional metal hydrides. He received his PhD in chemistry at Caltech under Prof. Harry Gray, studying the folding kinetics and interprotein electron transfer dynamics of metalloproteins, and was awarded the Herbert McKoy Award for outstanding contributions to chemistry. Akif carried out his postdoctoral studies as a Helen Hay Whitney fellow in Prof. Doug Rees’s laboratory at Caltech, where he focused on energy transduction mechanisms in biological nitrogen fixation. Akif and his group’s research program at UCSD has been recognized with several awards including NSF CAREER, Sloan Fellowship, Beckman Young Investigator Award, Frasch Foundation Award, Saltman and Swift Lectureships and the Early Career Award from the Society of Biological Inorganic Chemistry.

Photo Credit: Jasmin Faraone-Mennella