Dean’s Distinguished Speaker Lecture Series presents Prof Christopher J. Chang

Join the College of Engineering (CoE) on Thursday, 12 February 2026, 2:00 PM as Professor Christopher J. Chang from Princeton University presents a lecture on Activity-Based Sensing: Using Chemical Reactivity to Decode Biology at the Atomic Scale as part of the Dean’s Distinguished Speaker Series.

The Dean’s Distinguished Speaker Series is an initiative by the College that brings distinguished experts to interact with members of the engineering community for intellectual exchange and partnership.

The lecture is open to both the NTU community and the public. Please register your attendance. 

Abstract

Traditional strategies for developing selective imaging reagents rely on molecular recognition and static lock-and-key binding to achieve high specificity. We are advancing an alternative approach to chemical probe design, termed activity-based sensing, in which we exploit inherent differences in chemical reactivity as a foundation for distinguishing between chemical analytes that are similar in shape and size within complex biological systems. This presentation will focus on activity-based sensing approaches to visualize dynamic fluxes of metal ions, reactive oxygen species, and reactive carbon species and their signal/stress contributions to living systems, along with activity-based proteomics probes to identify their biological targets at atomic scale. As a representative example of new biological lessons learned from these chemical probes, we are advancing a new paradigm of transition metal signaling, where metal nutrients like copper can serve as dynamic signals to regulate protein function by metalloallostery and promote copper-dependent cell growth and death pathways termed cuproplasia and cuproptosis, respectively. A second example of single-atom chemical biology comes from reversible redox interconversion between methionine and methionine sulfoxide, where activity-based probes reveal the landscape of site-specific proteome modifications at single amino acid resolution to identify new redox-dependent disease vulnerabilities.

Biography

Professor Christopher J. Chang is a pioneer in the fields of bioinorganic chemistry and chemical biology. In 2024, he joined Princeton University as the Edward and Virginia Taylor Professor of Bioorganic Chemistry. Previously, he spent two decades at the University of California, Berkeley, where he held the Class of 1942 Chair. Professor Chang earned his B.S. and M.S. from Caltech, a Ph.D. with Prof. Daniel G. Nocera at MIT, and completed postdoctoral training with Prof. Stephen J. Lippard at MIT. His group is interested in studying the chemistry and biology of the elements, advancing new concepts in imaging, proteomics, drug discovery, and catalysis. He has been leading the development of "activity-based sensing" as a general platform to identify transition metals, reactive oxygen species, and one-carbon units as new classes of single-atom signals for allosteric regulation of protein function. This has revealed unique metal and redox disease vulnerabilities as targets for innovative drug discovery efforts to treat neurodegeneration, cancer, and metabolic disorders. Beyond his research, he currently serves as the Editor-in-Chief of Accounts of Chemical Research. His contributions have been recognized with numerous awards, including the Guggenheim Fellowship (2021), Humboldt Research Award (2020), Blavatnik National Award in Chemistry (2015), and election as Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2017). Notably, Professor Chang has mentored over 150 researchers, dozens of whom now lead their own academic laboratories worldwide.