Frances Arnold

Frances Hamilton Arnold (born July 25, 1956) is an American chemical engineer and Nobel Laureate. She is the Linus Pauling Professor of Chemical Engineering, Bioengineering and Biochemistry at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). In 2018, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for pioneering the use of directed evolution to engineer enzymes. Since January 2021, she serves as an external co-chair of President Joe Biden's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST). Early life and education Arnold is the daughter of Josephine Inman (née Routheau) and nuclear physicist William Howard Arnold, and the granddaughter of Lieutenant General William Howard Arnold. She has an older brother, Bill and younger brothers, Edward, David and Thomas. She grew up in the Pittsburgh suburb of Edgewood, and the Pittsburgh neighborhoods of Shadyside and Squirrel Hill, graduating from the city's Taylor Allderdice High School in 1974. As a high schooler, she hitchhiked to Washington, D.C., to protest the Vietnam War and lived on her own, working as a cocktail waitress at a local jazz club and a cab driver. The same independence that drove Arnold to move out of her childhood home as a teenager also led to a large volume of absences from school and low grades. In spite of this, she made near perfect scores on standardized tests and was determined to attend Princeton University, the alma mater of her father. She applied as a mechanical engineering major and was accepted. Arnold's motivation behind studying engineering, as stated in her Nobel Prize interview, was that "[mechanical engineering] was the easiest option and the easiest way to get into Princeton University at the time and I never left".