Emily Balskus

Emily Balskus serves as the Thomas Dudley Cabot Professor of Chemistry at Harvard University's Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology within the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. She is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator actively accepting graduate students, with her laboratory located in Conant 208, Cambridge. Her extensive affiliations include Associate Member of the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, Faculty Associate of Harvard's Microbial Sciences Initiative, and recipient of multiple prestigious awards.

Her research focuses on discovering and manipulating microbial metabolism through interdisciplinary approaches combining microbiology, biochemistry, and organic chemistry. The Balskus lab specializes in elucidating novel enzymatic pathways in microbial genomes with emphasis on human microbiome functions, developing biocompatible chemical transformations for cellular metabolite modification, and investigating microbial roles in drug metabolism (notably the digoxin-inactivating enzyme discovery). Current work explores nitrogen-nitrogen bond formation mechanisms in natural product biosynthesis.

• Smith Family Award for Excellence in Biomedical Research (2011)
• NIH Director's New Innovator Award (2012)
• Searle Scholar (2012)
• ACS National Award
• Waterman Award ($1M)

Professor Balskus mentors a robust research group with numerous graduate students and postdoctoral researchers, as evidenced by her extensive team listings. She leads significant grant-funded initiatives including her Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigatorship and NIH New Innovator project. The laboratory, administered by Rhonda Pautler, maintains active collaborations through Harvard's Microbial Sciences Initiative and the Broad Institute, driving innovations in microbiome-targeted therapeutics and chemical biology tools development.