Chaitan Khosla
Chaitan Khosla is a Professor in the Departments of Chemical Engineering and Chemistry at Stanford University, and Director of the Stanford Institute for Chemical Biology. He received his PhD in chemical engineering in 1990 at Caltech. After completing postdoctoral studies in genetics at the John Innes Centre in the UK, he joined Stanford University in 1992. His research on polyketide synthases has opened the door to fundamentally new approaches for engineering of antibiotics. More recently, he has also investigated celiac sprue pathogenesis with the goal of developing therapies for this widespread but overlooked disease. He has co-authored over 300 peer-reviewed publications and 75 issued U.S. patents, and is the recipient of several awards and honors including the Eli Lilly Award in Biological Chemistry and the Pure Chemistry Award from the American Chemical Society; the Allan P. Colburn Award and the Professional Progress Award from the American Institute of Chemical Engineers; and the Alan T. Waterman Award from the National Science Foundation. He is an elected member of the American Academy for Arts and Science and the National Academy of Engineering. Over the past two decades, he has co-founded four biotechnology companies (Kosan Biosciences (KOSN), Alvine Pharmaceuticals, Flamentera AG, Sitari Pharmaceuticals), and was the founding President of the non-profit Celiac Sprue Research Foundation.