Chaitan Khosla elected to the National Academy of Sciences

WASHINGTON — The National Academy of Sciences announced today the election of 120 members and 26 international members in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research.

Those elected today bring the total number of active members to 2,403 and the total number of international members to 501. International members are nonvoting members of the Academy, with citizenship outside the United States.

The list of newly elected members and their affiliations at the time of election can be found at the National Academy of Sciences.

Congratulations to Chaitan Khosla for his election to the National Academy of Sciences! Khosla joined the Department of Chemistry in 1997 and is the Baker Family Co-Director of Stanford ChEM-H, Wells H. Rauser and Harold M. Petiprin Professor in the School of Engineering and Professor of Chemistry and, by courtesy, of Biochemistry.  He pursued his PhD in Chemical Engineering at the California Institute of Technology and was a postdoc at the John Innes Centre.  His research focuses on problems where deep insights into enzymology and metabolism can be harnessed to improve human health. In particular, he has studied and engineered enzymatic assembly lines called polyketide synthases that catalyze the biosynthesis of structurally complex and medicinally fascinating antibiotics in bacteria.  One example of such an assembly line is found in the erythromycin biosynthetic pathway, where he has focused on understanding the structure and mechanism of this polyketide synthase.  He is also developing methods to decode the vast and growing number of orphan polyketide assembly lines in the sequence databases. In addition, his lab investigates the pathogenesis of celiac disease, an autoimmune disorder of the small intestine, with the goal of discovering therapies and related management tools for this widespread but overlooked disease.  Ongoing efforts in this realm are directed at understanding the pivotal role of transglutaminase 2 in triggering the inflammatory response to dietary gluten in the celiac intestine.