Rate My Professor Ahmed Badran

Ahmed Badran, PhD, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Chemistry at The Scripps Research Institute, with joint appointments in Integrative Structural and Computational Biology and the Skaggs Graduate School of Chemical and Biological Sciences. He earned a Ph.D. in Chemical Biology from Harvard University in 2016 as an NSF Graduate Research Fellow and a B.S. in Biochemistry, Molecular Biophysics, and Molecular and Cellular Biology from the University of Arizona in 2010. Prior to his 2021 appointment at Scripps Research, Badran served as a Fellow and Principal Investigator at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, where he pioneered high-throughput strategies for evolving proteins and technologies to expand the genetic code of cells. During his graduate studies, he received awards including the Christensen Prize for Outstanding Research Achievement (2014, 2015), GSAS Merit Fellowship (2014), Certificate of Distinction in Teaching (2013), and Reaxys Ph.D. Prize Finalist (2017).

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.