Group Members

Senior Scientist

Office: Bldg. 66, Rm 329

Phone: 510-486-4963

Email: vkyachandra@lbl.gov

Vittal was born in Masulipatnam, India in 1953.  He received his B.Sc. from Loyola College, University of Madras, India in 1973, and a M.Sc. Degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, India in 1975. He then moved to the United States and received a M.S. degree in Chemistry from the University of Chicago in 1977, and a Ph. D. in Chemistry from Princeton University in 1982, where he used resonance Raman spectroscopy to study iron-sulfur proteins and analogs, and Zn and Co carbonic anhydrase using X-ray absorption spectroscopy with Thomas G. Spiro. Subsequently, he came to Berkeley as a Postdoctoral Fellow in 1982 with Melvin Klein and Kenneth Sauer to study the water oxidizing complex in Photosystem II, where he became a Staff Scientist in 1985. He is currently a Senior Scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in the Molecular Biophysics and Integrated Bioimaging Division.
Vittal's main research interest has focused on the use of EPR, X-ray spectroscopy, and X-ray crystallography to study the Mn4Ca water-oxidizing catalyst in photosynthesis, and also other metalloenzymes, with special emphasis on the use of femtosecond X-ray laser facilities to study the time-evolution of the catalytic reactions, with the goal of applying the principles learned from nature to create/study bio-inspired systems.