Milan Mrksich

Milan Mrksich is the Henry Wade Rogers Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Professor of Chemistry, and Professor of Cell and Developmental Biology in the Biology faculty at Northwestern University. He earned a B.S. in Chemistry magna cum laude from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1989 and a Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry from the California Institute of Technology in 1994, advised by Peter B. Dervan. Mrksich completed an American Cancer Society postdoctoral fellowship in George M. Whitesides' laboratory at Harvard University from 1994 to 1996. He joined the University of Chicago as Assistant Professor of Chemistry in 1996, was promoted to Associate Professor in 2000, and to Professor in 2003. In 2011, he assumed his current positions at Northwestern University. Administratively, he served as Vice President for Research from 2020 to 2023, following an interim appointment from October 2019; Director of the Center for Synthetic Biology from 2016 to 2019; Associate Director for Technology at the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center from 2015 to 2019; Associate Director of the Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center from 2001 to 2015; and Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator from 2005 to 2013. Mrksich founded SAMDI Tech, Inc. in 2011, where he served as Chairman until 2023, and has been involved with other ventures including WMR Biomedical, Inc. and ModuMab Therapeutics, Inc.

The research of the Mrksich Group operates at the interface of chemistry, biology, and engineering, developing self-assembled monolayers of alkanethiolates on gold as model biointerfaces; dynamic substrates that switch ligand activities with electrical or optical signals to study cell responses; biochip arrays analyzed by SAMDI mass spectrometry for label-free high-throughput screening of enzymatic reactions and protein modifications; and megamolecules—fusion protein architectures assembled via covalent inhibitors for complex structures used in diagnostics, therapeutics, and synthetic biology. Key contributions include mimics of the extracellular matrix for novel cell adhesion ligands and SAMDI-MS for functional annotation of genes and protein acetylation networks. Representative publications are 'Design and Synthesis of Megamolecule Mimics of a Therapeutic Antibody' (Journal of the American Chemical Society, 2020), 'Solid-Phase Synthesis of Megamolecules' (JACS, 2020), 'Sequential Glycosylation of Proteins with Substrate-Specific N-Glycosyltransferases' (ACS Central Science, 2020), 'High-throughput mapping of CoA metabolites by SAMDI-MS to optimize the cell-free biosynthesis of HMG-CoA' (Science Advances, 2019), and 'Synthesis of Cyclic Megamolecules' (JACS, 2018). His honors include the 2020 Pittsburgh Analytical Chemistry Award, 2016 iBIO iCON Innovator Award, 2012 American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering Fellowship, 2005 American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellowship, 2003 ACS Arthur C. Cope Young Scholar Award, 2000 Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, 2000 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, 1996-1999 Searle Scholar Award, and others.

Professional Email: milan.mrksich@northwestern.edu