The Santa Barbara Foundation stewards hundreds of funds on behalf of donors who want their giving to make a lasting difference. Among those are Field of Interest Funds, a type of fund through which a donor defines a specific area of charitable purpose. SBF then identifies and supports organizations doing meaningful work in that area.
The Otis M. Williams and Evelyn Freeman Williams Fund is one of those. Established in 2007 by Otis and Evelyn Williams, it directs support to universities and research centers for scientific research in physiology and related fields. Over nearly two decades, SBF has channeled that mission to nonprofits doing exactly that kind of work, including UC Santa Barbara’s postdoctoral fellowship program.
A postdoctoral fellowship is the stage just after a researcher earns their PhD. It offers a brief window, often just one or two years, before the demands of academic or industry life take over: the teaching loads, the administrative responsibilities, and the grant-writing that consumes so much of a professor’s time. For a short period, a postdoctoral fellow can do something rare in the modern research university: dedicate all of their time to discovery. UCSB’s Otis Williams Fellowship Program is designed to protect that window.
In Professor Yang’s laboratory at UC Santa Barbara, you can see what that protected time makes possible.
Dr. Wei Huang arrived as an Otis Williams Fellow with an ambitious goal: to design entirely new enzymes from scratch.
With the support of his two-year fellowship, Dr. Huang helped develop a computer-based process to design custom enzymes: proteins that drive chemical reactions. These enzymes can manufacture pharmaceuticals more efficiently and more cleanly than traditional chemistry, in far fewer steps. A process that once required five chemical steps, with toxic solvents and significant waste, can now happen in a single biological step using water. The research has drawn the attention of major pharmaceutical partners who are exploring how it could transform drug manufacturing on a large scale.
The work was published in Science, one of the most prestigious scientific journals in the world.
The project has continued to grow. What began as one postdoctoral fellow’s project is now a team of six researchers at UCSB, all building on the foundation Dr. Huang laid.
“If we didn’t have these fellows in our group,” Professor Yang told SBF’s program officers during a recent visit, “then the entire project would not be possible.”
Since 2007, the Otis Williams Fund has supported 34 postdoctoral fellows advised by 26 professors at UCSB. It shows what a clearly defined donor vision can make possible when it’s carried forward consistently over time.
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