Berkeley Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellowship Program
The University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program offers postdoctoral research fellowships, professional development and faculty mentoring to outstanding scholars in all fields whose research, teaching, and service will advance the research excellence and public service missions of the UC.
We are pleased to announce our 2026-27 Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellows! These fellows provide an outstanding pool of potential new faculty members in a wide range of disciplines.
Dr. Aronson is a geobiologist and geomicrobiologist who studies microbial metabolisms that operate under extreme energy limitation. Her research integrates thermodynamics, cultivation, physiology, and geochemistry to identify and characterize poorly understood anaerobic metabolisms in subsurface environments. Through this approach, she examines their contributions to biogeochemical cycling, their role in supporting Earth’s earliest ecosystems, and their implications for habitability on other planetary bodies.
As a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow, Dr. Aronson will investigate the isotopic signatures of microbial phosphite oxidation, a metabolism that may have helped sustain early microbial communities. Building on her discovery of lithosyntrophic phosphite oxidation, her research will quantify oxygen isotope fractionations associated with microbial phosphorus redox cycling and evaluate whether these signatures can be preserved in phosphate minerals from ancient rocks. This work will provide new tools for interpreting phosphorus cycling on the early Earth and for recognizing potential biosignatures in the geologic records of Earth and other planets.
Dr. Aronson received her Ph.D. in Marine Biology and Biological Oceanography from the University of Southern California and her B.A. in Biology from Occidental College. Before beginning graduate school, she worked at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, first as an undergraduate intern and later as a Planetary Protection Engineer.
Landen is interested in mobile genetic elements (MGEs) and the molecular and evolutionary mechanisms that shape genome evolution. Landen's research career started as an undergraduate in Russell Corbett-Detig's Lab at UC Santa Cruz studying how new introns are generated in eukaryotes. Landen then completed a PhD with Hopi Hoekstra at Harvard University, where he investigated the implications of host-MGE conflict on genome structure, the molecular origins and implications of karyotype-altering chromosomal inversions, and the utility of pangenome graphs for studying structural variation in natural mammalian populations. As a Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellow, Landen's research leverages state-of-the-art long-read approaches to identify the genomic determinants and evolutionary processes shaping de-novo mobile element insertions, as well as the functional roles of mobile genetic elements in innate immune adaptation.
Santiago C. López: 2026-27 Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow
Santiago C. López (he/him) is a 2026-2027 Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology working with Professor Jennifer Doudna. Dr. López combines microbiology, structural biology, and metagenomics to interrogate the non-immune and ecological roles of bacterial immune systems. He is particularly interested in their role in orchestrating the delicate dance performed by complex microbial communities that inhabit our ecosystems. This work builds on his doctoral training with Professor Seth Shipman, where besides repurposing bacterial retrons for biotechnological applications, he studied how CRISPR immune memory are made: he uncovered a global regulator of the cellular stress response crucial to this process, an early indication that bacterial immunity is deeply tied and attuned to cell physiology.
Santiago holds a Ph.D. in Bioengineering from the University of California, San Francisco, and a B.S. in Biology from Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia.
UC President’s Initiative
University of California President Janet Napolitano committed $5 million to support new hiring incentives and professional development programs.
