Rate My Professor Nikhil Nair

Nikhil Nair is an Associate Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering in the School of Engineering at Tufts University. He received his B.S. in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering from Cornell University in 2003. Following this, he worked as a manufacturing research scientist at Bristol-Myers Squibb in biotechnology purification development. Nair then earned his M.S. in 2006 and Ph.D. in 2010 in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he developed metabolic engineering processes for xylitol production in E. coli and butanol production in yeast using protein and genome engineering techniques. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship in microbiology and immunobiology at Harvard Medical School under Professor Ann Hochschild before joining Tufts University in 2013.

Research in the Nair lab focuses on engineering aspects of microbial physiology for biotechnological applications and to understand evolutionary developments in biological systems. This work encompasses synthetic biology, systems bioengineering, protein engineering, metabolic engineering, biofuels, and biocatalysis, involving targeted alterations to genes, proteins, and metabolites. Nair has earned major awards, including the 2016 NIH Director’s New Innovator Award for studies on the gut microbiome and metabolic disorders. In 2025, he received the Rising Innovator of the Year award at Tufts University’s Inventor Recognition Event for contributions to microbial synthetic and systems biology, which have produced four issued U.S. patents, several pending applications, and two company spinouts: Enrich Bio and Caravel Bio. He was named a Senior Member of the National Academy of Inventors in 2026. His publications include highly cited papers such as “Design and construction of acetyl-CoA overproducing Saccharomyces cerevisiae strains” (Metabolic Engineering, 2014), “Synthetic biology approaches to engineer probiotics and members of the human microbiota for biomedical applications” (Annual Review of Biomedical Engineering, 2018), and “Specific codons control cellular resources and fitness” (Science Advances, 2024), with over 1,900 citations on Google Scholar reflecting his influence in the field.