HWNI member Karthik Shekhar, assistant professor of chemical & biomolecular engineering, has been named a 2026 Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar by the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation. The award honors early-career faculty in the chemical sciences who have created an outstanding independent body of scholarship and are deeply committed to undergraduate education.
Shekhar will receive an unrestricted research grant of $100,000 for his proposed project, “The Chemical Physics of Bioelectricity: From Ion Channels to Emergent Excitability”. Shekhar works at the interface of neuroscience, genomics, and biophysics, and his research uses theory, computation, and data-driven approaches to understand the organization and dynamics of neuronal systems. He has also won several awards for his teaching at UC Berkeley.
