Markita del Carpio Landry is a Bolivian-American chemist who is an assistant professor in the department of chemical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research considers nanomaterials for brain imaging and the development of sustainable crops. She was a recipient of the 2022 Vilcek prize for creative promise. del Carpio Landry's work has been featured on NPR, popular mechanics, the San Francisco Chronicle, and C&E News.
del Carpio Landry's parents are both teachers, and she has said that her early training was in curiosity-based science. Landry earned her bachelor's degrees at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she majored in both chemistry and physics. She moved to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign for doctoral studies and earned a Ph.D. in chemical physics. Her research considered the development of single-molecule spectroscopies for investigating DNA polymer oxidative damage. del Carpio Landry was a National Science Foundation postdoctoral scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She performed research at both the Technical University of Munich and Osaka University. del Carpio Landry is a fluent speaker of French, English, and Spanish.
In July 2016, del Carpio Landry was appointed to the faculty at Berkeley, where she started to explore nanotechnology-based approaches to image neuromodulation in the brain using synthetic nanoparticle-polymer conjugates. Such materials are incredibly versatile, with tunable chemical and physical properties. They can be processed using low cost fabrication techniques, permitting the creation of biomimetic structures. She uses functionalism carbon nanotubes to detect the neurotransmitters dopamine and norepinephrine with high spatial and temporal resolution. She simultaneously develops near-infrared fluorescent probes to explore fundamental biological processes.
del Carpio Landry has also demonstrated that carbon nanotubes can be used to deliver DNA into plant cells with applications in plant genome editing. Delivering DNA to plants is complicated due to the rigid, multi-layer cell walls, yet del Carpio Landry has also demonstrated that nanoparticles can be used to deliver RNA into plants. During the COVID-19 pandemic, del Carpio Landry started to explore nanosenors for detecting the spike proteins of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) and to increase the sensitivity of RT-qPCR detection of SARS-CoV-2 infections.