Alice Y. Ting

Alice Ting is a Taiwanese-American chemist whose laboratory builds engineered enzymes and chemical tools for watching what happens inside living cells. She was born in Taiwan, moved to the United States at the age of three and grew up in Texas, where she attended the Texas Academy of Mathematics and Science. She took a chemistry degree at Harvard University in 1996 with the Nobel laureate E. J. Corey, completed her doctorate with Peter Schultz at the University of California, Berkeley in 2000, and trained as a postdoctoral fellow with Roger Tsien at the University of California, San Diego. She joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology chemistry department in 2002 and moved to Stanford University in 2016, where she holds appointments in genetics, biology and, by courtesy, chemistry. Her group is credited with proximity labeling tools made by directed evolution, including the peroxidase APEX2 and the biotin ligases TurboID and miniTurbo, which tag the proteins and RNA lying within a few nanometers of a chosen molecule inside a living cell. She has been a Chan Zuckerberg Biohub investigator since 2017 and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2023.