Directing Biosynthesis VIII

Chaitan Khosla is a professor in the departments of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at Stanford University. His research interests lie at the chemistry-biology interface. He served as the founding director of Stanford’s ChEM-H Institute and presently serves as the founding director of its Innovative Medicines Accelerator. Chaitan received his PhD in 1990 at Caltech. After completing postdoctoral studies in genetics at the John Innes Centre in the UK, he joined Stanford University in 1992. He has co-authored over 400 peer-reviewed publications and 75 issued U.S. patents. He is an elected member of the American Academy for Arts and Science, the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. Over the past three decades, he has helped launch four companies based on research advances in his laboratory

Sarah O’Connor received her degrees in chemistry from the University of Chicago (BSc) and MIT (PhD), and performed her post-doctoral work at Harvard Medical School. She was a Professor and Project Leader in Biological Chemistry at the John Innes Centre from 2011 to 2019. She has been the Director of the Department of Natural Product Biosynthesis at the Max Planck Institute of Chemical Ecology since summer 2019. Her research interests focus on plants' natural products, with a particular interest in the iridoids and alkaloids. Her research group takes a broad approach to understand plant biosynthetic pathways, ranging from gene discovery, mechanistic enzymology, and metabolic engineering. She has received the Leibniz Prize (2023), ACS Ernest Guenther Award in Natural Products (2022), Royal Society of Chemistry Perkin Prize for Organic Chemistry (2019); European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant (2018); Election to European Molecular Biology Organization (2017), Wain Medal (2013). 

Eriko Takano is Professor of Synthetic Biology in the Manchester Institute of Biotechnology at the University of Manchester. She is the Program Director for the Singapore Integrative Biosystems and Engineering Research (SIBER) Strategic Research & Translational Thrust (SRTT) Program in A*STAR (since Jan 2025) and a visiting Professor at the Graduate School of Engineering, Osaka University, Japan.
Eriko is internationally recognized as a pioneer in the synthetic biology for antibiotic production and has been working in both industrial and academic research. Eriko’s research interests cover many facets of microbial synthetic biology. She is serving as an expert advisor for national and international bodies, including the OECD, the DSIT, BBSRC Council and various Japanese funding bodies (NEDO, JST, JSPS).