Miguel García-Garibay, dean of the UCLA Division of Physical Sciences and professor of chemistry and biochemistry, has been selected to join the Mexican Academy of Sciences as a corresponding member.

García-Garibay has earned worldwide recognition in the fields of organic photochemistry, solid-state organic chemistry and physical organic chemistry. He studies the interaction of light and molecules in crystals. Light can have enough energy to break and make bonds in molecules, and his research team has shown that crystals offer an opportunity to control the outcome of those chemical reactions.

He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2020 and elected a fellow of the American Chemical Society in 2019.

García-Garibay’s research has applications for green chemistry — the design of chemical products and processes that reduce or eliminate the generation of hazardous substances. His investigations could lead to the production of specialty chemicals that would be very difficult to produce by traditional methods due to their complex structures. 

His research group has made advances in the field of artificial molecular machines and amphidynamic crystals, a term García-Garibay coined to describe crystals built with molecules that have a combination of static and mobile components. García-Garibay’s research is funded by the National Science Foundation, among other sources.

The Mexican Academy of Sciences, or Academia Mexicana de Ciencias, was established in 1959 as a nonprofit, nongovernmental association of distinguished members of the Mexican scientific community, to promote scientific development in Mexico and foster communication and collaboration with distinguished scholars in other countries.