Members

Yi Tang received his undergraduate degree in Chemical Engineering and Material Science from Penn State University.  He received his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from California Institute of Technology under the guidance of Prof. David A. Tirrell.  After NIH postdoctoral training in Chemical Biology from Prof. Chaitan Khosla at Stanford University, he started his independent career at University of California Los Angeles in 2004.  He currently holds joint (50/50) appointments in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at UCLA.   He is the Parson's Family Foundation Professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering.  His notable awards include the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) Allan P. Colburn Award (2009), the American Chemical Society (ACS) Biochemical Technology Division (BIOT) Young Investigator Award (2011), the ACS Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award (2012), the EPA Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Award (2012), NIH DP1 Director Pioneer Award (2012), the ACS Eli Lilly Award in Biological Chemistry (2014), the Society of Industrial Microbiology and Biotechnology Charles Thom Award (2019) and the ACS BIOT Marvin Johnson Award (2025).  

Masao (Masa) Ohashi is an assistant Project Scientist in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at UCLA. His responsibilities include teaching, mentoring and research at UCLA.  For research, he is housed in Prof. Yi Tang’s group for equipment and facilities.  For his own research program, he is focused on discovery, characterization and application of enzymes responsible for formation of unique but biologically important functional groups in natural products.   During his PhD training in Japan, his research area was medicinal chemistry which offered him not only knowledge and techniques for organic chemistry, biochemistry, and cell biology but also to realize how important diverse chemical scaffolds and functional groups are for biological activities and druggable properties.   During his Postdoc training at UCLA, he discovered and characterized a variety of new enzymes from natural product biosynthetic pathways.   Especially, among the list of enzymes he discovered and characterized, are i) “pericyclases” that catalyze pericyclic reactions (Ohashi et al., Nature, 2017; Ohashi et al., Nature, 2020); ii) PLP-dependent core enzymes (Ohashi et al, JACS 2024); iii) and Copper dependent redox enzymes (Chiang et al, Ohashi*, Nature, 2025).