Rate My Professor Ahmed Badran

The Badran Lab integrates chemical biology, bioengineering, directed evolution, genome editing, and synthetic biology to study and reprogram central biomolecular machines for applications addressing antimicrobial resistance, biologics production, climate change, and novel therapeutics. Research efforts include developing pathogen-specific antibiotics, carbon-sequestering enzymes, new-to-nature catalysts, and bioactive modalities. Key publications feature "Efficient Genetic Code Expansion Without Host Genome Modifications" (Nature Biotechnology, 2024), "Directed Evolution of Hyperactive Integrases for Site Specific Insertion of Transgenes" (Nucleic Acids Research, 2024), "Genetic Code Expansion History and Modern Innovations" (Chemical Reviews, 2024), "Clinically relevant mutations in core metabolic genes confer antibiotic resistance" (Science, 2021), "A Deep Learning Approach to Antibiotic Discovery" (Cell, 2020), and "Programmable base editing of A•T to G•C in genomic DNA without DNA cleavage" (Nature, 2017). Badran holds U.S. patents such as US 10,179,911 on negative selection in continuous evolution and US 10,612,011 on evolution of TALENs. His achievements include the 2025 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), 2025 Hypothesis Fund Award, 2024 Chemical & Engineering News Talented 12, 2024 Baxter Young Investigator Award, 2023 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, NIH Director’s Early Independence Award (2021), and grants from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Breakthrough Energy Fellows, and Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research. Badran has delivered lectures such as "Re-engineering a sustainable world" in the Scripps Front Row series and appeared in podcasts on bioengineering for climate change.