Frances Arnold is the Linus Pauling Professor of Chemical Engineering, Bioengineering and Biochemistry at the California Institute of Technology and co-Chair of President Biden’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.  She received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry (2018) for pioneering the directed evolution of enzymes. Her group has been using directed evolution to explore new-to-nature enzyme chemistry (mainly carbene and nitrene transfer) and enzyme-catalyzed synthesis of noncanonical amino acids. The group also develops machine-learning guided approaches to directed protein evolution.