Walk into the Landry Lab and you feel it immediately: a sense that science is less a set of answers than a set of better questions. Professor Markita del Carpio Landry, faculty member, and recipient of the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise, has built a research home where those questions are welcomed, sharpened, and then set loose on some of the most complex challenges in biology.
Her path to that lab culture began at Cal. As a graduate student, Professor Landry found herself drawn to the kind of interdisciplinary thinking that Berkeley seems to generate: physics next to chemistry, biology next to engineering, curiosity threaded through all of it. She talks about that period as a pivot from learning about science to doing it, taking ideas off the blackboard and turning them into tools that matter. That’s a line she still walks, intentionally, every day.
Today, Professor Landry’s team is known for designs at the smallest scale with the widest ripple. Their work with nanomaterials has opened new ways to see and communicate with living systems, sensors that can visualize neurochemicals in the brain; delivery platforms that usher genetic cargo into plant cells without scarring the tissue; materials that let researchers read biology in real time rather than only in retrospect. The thread running through it all is utility with humility: technology that serves discovery, not the other way around.
None of that happens in a vacuum. Professor Landry is candid about how a field’s composition shapes its questions. When the same kinds of people are funded, she notes, the same kinds of problems dominate. Expanding who does science expands what science can do. That conviction shows up operationally in her lab: recruiting broadly, mentoring deliberately, and insisting that “potential” isn’t code for “already polished.” It also shows up in the questions the group chooses, questions that intersect food systems, climate, and public health, where good tools can translate into real-world resilience.
Recognition followed, being named among the “100 Most Inspiring Hispanic/Latinx Scientists in America,” the Vilcek Prize, and a collection of fellowships and early-career awards. But what stands out in conversation is how she converts accolades into responsibility. Awards are signals, not finish lines; they widen the platform from which to mentor, advocate, and build coalitions that change the composition of a field.
Mentorship, for Professor Landry, is a practice of precision and care. She describes the temptation, common in high-speed labs, to mistake volume for progress. Instead, she teaches students to ask the right question at the right time, to design controls that genuinely test their assumptions, to treat failure as a data point rather than a verdict. It’s the Cal ethos in motion: rigor with heart. She asks trainees to bring their whole selves to the bench, not only because belonging improves outcomes (it does), but because science that ignores lived experience misses too much.
The inclusive choices are structural too. Lab meetings rotate facilitation. First-generation students get explicit playbooks for publishing, presenting, and applying for grants. Senior trainees learn how to mentor, not just how to pipette. Collaboration isn’t a vibe; it’s a skill everyone practices. The result is a lab that is a microcosm of the university we aspire to be: intellectually fearless, materially supportive, and clear about its obligations to the public.
If you want to understand Professor Landry’s north star, consider how she frames impact. She cares that a new sensor can answer a question neuroscientists couldn’t even ask ten years ago. She also cares that a plant-delivery platform might make crop improvement more precise, faster, and more accessible in a warming world. Knowledge and usefulness aren’t rivals. They are the double helix of her work.
That outlook has shaped how she thinks about the future of science at Berkeley. The big problems, food security, climate resilience, neurological disease, don’t respect departmental boundaries, and so the solutions can’t either. Professor Landry argues for more shared infrastructure, more co-advised students, more paths where a biologist can learn to engineer and an engineer can learn to listen to ecosystems. In other words: more Berkeley.
Ask her what she most wants students to carry with them, and the answer loops back to first principles. Curiosity is a discipline, not a personality trait. Excellence is repeatable when you design for it. And belonging is not a prize you earn; it’s a condition leaders create. She credits mentors who didn’t simply open doors but showed her how to keep them open for others. Now, as a professor, she treats that as work, not sentiment, something to budget time for, measure, and improve.
There’s a quiet confidence in the way Professor Landry narrates her path: not triumphalist, but creator. The story is less “arriving” than “building,” a lab, a field, a community where different perspectives generate different questions, and different questions lead to better answers. It’s the kind of story that feels unmistakably Berkeley: rigorous, public-spirited, and restless in the best way.
That spirit animates the Landry Lab’s next chapter. New materials, new collaborations, new students ready to ask something no one has asked yet. If the last decade proved anything, it’s that when curiosity meets inclusion, the work accelerates, not just for one lab, but for the people and places that lab ultimately serves.
Photo Credits: Markita del Carpio Landry
