Rate My Professor Ahmed Badran

Ahmed Badran is an Associate Professor in the Department of Chemistry at The Scripps Research Institute, holding joint appointments in the Department of Integrative Structural and Computational Biology and the Skaggs Graduate School of Chemical and Biological Sciences. He received his B.S. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics from the University of Arizona in 2010 and his Ph.D. in Chemical Biology from Harvard University in 2016 as an NSF Graduate Research Fellow. During his doctoral studies, Badran earned the Christensen Prize for Outstanding Research Achievement in 2014 and 2015, a Certificate of Distinction in Teaching in 2013, a GSAS Merit Fellowship in 2014, and was a finalist for the Reaxys Ph.D. Prize in 2017. He also received the NIH Early Investigator Award in 2017. Prior to joining Scripps Research in 2021, Badran served as a fellow and principal investigator at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, where he developed high-throughput strategies for evolving proteins and technologies to expand the genetic code of cells.

Badran's research program combines chemical biology, bioengineering, directed evolution, genome editing, and synthetic biology to engineer integrated cellular signaling networks for applications in antimicrobial development, biologics production, information maintenance and transmission, climate change mitigation, and sustainable biomanufacturing. His laboratory focuses on engineering carbon-sequestering enzymes, discovering pathogen-specific antibiotics, creating new-to-nature catalysts, and enabling rapid therapeutics development. Key contributions include orthogonal translation systems for ribosome engineering, multiplex suppression of quadruplet codons, and continuous bioactivity-dependent evolution of antibiotic pathways. Prominent publications encompass 'Programmable base editing of A•T to G•C in genomic DNA without DNA cleavage' (Nature, 2017), 'A deep learning approach to antibiotic discovery' (Cell, 2020), and 'Clinically relevant mutations in core metabolic genes confer antibiotic resistance' (Science, 2021). Badran has secured major awards including the 2025 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, 2025 Hypothesis Fund Award, 2024 Chemical & Engineering News Talented 12 Award, 2024 Baxter Young Investigator Award, 2023 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, NIH Director’s Early Independence Award, and grants from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Breakthrough Energy Fellows, and Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research. His innovations hold patents such as 'Negative selection and stringency modulation in continuous evolution' (US 10,179,911) and have advanced synthetic biology tools for biotechnology and medicine.