Alex Katz received his B.S. and M.S. in Chemical Engineering from University of Minnesota, working with Prof. Michael D. Ward at the interface of chemistry & chemical engineering. Four years later, as a Fannie & John Hertz Foundation Fellow, he completed his Ph.D. with Mark Davis at Caltech. He pursued an NSF International Awards Postdoctoral Fellowshiop in Strasbourg, France at the Institut of Supramolecular Chemistry (Institut Le Bel) at the University of Louis Pasteur. Since 2000, he has been the principal investigator of a multidisciplinary research group in the Department of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering at UC Berkeley, exploring the molecular design, synthesis, and characterization of functional materials consisting of organic-inorganic active-site assemblies, and the application of these materials in catalysis and selective adsorption. He is a leader in the understanding of functional sites on the molecular level, as an enabler of rational materials-design approaches. Much of his research group's approach consists of synthesizing controlled organic-inorganic interfaces, in order to elucidate synthesis – function relationships. He has been awarded a Fulbright Fellowship, the Catalysis Society of Metropolitan New York Award for Excellence in Catalysis, as well as the Newman Entrepreneurial Initiative Award.