Judith Klinman

Judith P. Klinman (born April 17, 1941) is an American chemist, biochemist, and molecular biologist known for her work on enzyme catalysis. She became the first female professor in the physical sciences at UC Berkeley in 1978. In 2012, she was awarded the National Medal of Science by President Barack Obama.

She earned her A.B. from University of Pennsylvania in 1962 and Ph.D. in physical-organic chemistry from the same university in 1966.

After earning her Ph.D., she completed her postdoctoral training at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel and was a researcher at the Institute for Cancer Research in Philadelphia. In 1974, she joined the University of Pennsylvania as an Assistant Professor of biophysics. In 1978, she moved to University of California, Berkeley as an Associate Professor in Chemistry and later as the chair of the university's Chemistry Department. In 1978 she was the first female faculty member in the physical sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. She is currently the Professor of the Graduate School at the Departments of Chemistry and Molecular and Cell Biology and the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences at the University of California, Berkeley. Her group has discovered that room temperature hydrogen tunneling occurs among various enzymatic reactions, such as enzymatic C-H cleavage, and clarified the dynamics of tunneling process through data analysis. They have also discovered the quino-enzymes, a new class of redox cofactors in eukaryotic enzymes. She also served the Chancellor's Professor for University of California Berkeley. She currently serves as the Professor of the Graduate School.

• 1988 Guggenheim Fellowship
• 1992 and 2003-4 Miller Professorship, University of California, Berkeley.

• 1993 Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

• 1994 Elected to the National Academy of Sciences
• 1994 Repligen Award for Chemistry of Biological Processes.
• 1995 Alexander M. Cruickshank Lecturer
• 1996 Fellow of the Japanese Ministry of Science
• 2000 Honorary Doctorate (F.D.(h.c.)) from the University of Uppsala, Sweden.
• 2001 Elected to the American Philosophical Society
• 2003 David S. Sigman Lectureship Award from UCLA.

• 2005 Remsen Award, Maryland Section of the American Chemical Society
• 2006 Honorary Doctorate (Sc.D.(h.c.)) from the University of Pennsylvania

• 2007 Elected to the American Association for the Advancement of Science
• 2007 Merck Award from the American Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology
• 2009 Elected to the Royal Society of Chemistry
• 2011 Elected to the American Chemical Society
• 2012 A. I. Scott Medal for Excellence in Biological Chemistry Research, Texas A&M University.
• 2014 National Medal of Science.
• 2015 Mildred Cohn Award in Biological Chemistry from the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology.
• 2017 Willard Gibbs Award from the Chicago Section of the American Chemical Society
• 2018 Penn Chemistry Distinguished Alumni Award, University of Pennsylvania