keynote speaker

Dr. Angela Belcher

Our 2020 UCSB Graduate Division Commencement Keynote Speaker

The UCSB Graduate Division is pleased to announce that Dr. Angela Belcher `91, Ph.D. `97 will deliver the keynote address at the 2020 Commencement ceremony on Friday, June 12, 1 p.m. on the Commencement Green.

Belcher leads the Department of Biological Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She is also a faculty member in the departments of MIT Biological Engineering and Materials Science and Engineering. She is a pioneering biological and materials engineer with expertise in the fields of biomaterials, biomolecular materials, organic-inorganic interfaces, and solid-state chemistry and devices, based at the Koch Institute of Integrative Cancer Research.

Her research focuses on harnessing nature’s processes in order to design technologically important materials and devices for energy, the environment, and medicine. Belcher was awarded a Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) in 2000, and a Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering and Sloan Research Fellowship in 2001, and in 2004 was named a MacArthur Fellow. She was also named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2012, and won the Lemelson-MIT Prize in 2013, was named a fellow in the National Academy of Inventors in 2015, and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2018. In 2009 Rolling Stone magazine listed Belcher as one of the top 100 people changing the country, and in 2007 TIME magazine named her a “hero” for her research related to climate change. She has also received the Four Star General Recognition Award (U.S. Army) for significant contribution to army transformation and is a past winner of the Eni Prize for Renewable and Non-Conventional Energy.

She holds 40 patents and is cofounder of Cambrios Technologies and Siluria Technologies. She earned her bachelor’s degree in Creative Studies in 1991 and her Ph.D. in inorganic chemistry in 1997 at UC Santa Barbara.