Dr. Kevan M. Shokat

Kevan M. Shokat is currently an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Professor in the Department of Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology at the University of California at San Francisco, and Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of California at Berkeley. He received his B.A. in Chemistry from Reed College in 1986. After receiving his Ph.D. in organic chemistry at UC Berkeley with Professor Peter Schultz, and post-doctoral work in cellular immunology at Stanford University with Professor Chris Goodnow, he began his independent research career at Princeton University before moving to UCSF in 1999. Kevan’s research group is focused on the discovery of new small molecule tools and drug candidates targeting protein/lipid kinases, GTPases, and RNA helicases. His laboratory utilizes the tools of synthetic organic chemistry, protein engineering, structural biology, biochemistry and cell biology. In oncology and neurodegenerative diseases he focuses on targets in pathways which have been validated by human genetics including the first human oncogene KRAS, the lipid kinase PIK3CA, metabolic and growth factor sensitive kinase mTOR, the mitochondrial kinase PINK1 (Parkinson’s Disease). He was inducted into the National Academy of Sciences (2010), the National Academy of Medicine (2011), and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2011). In 2020 he received the Alfred Bader Award in Bioinorganic or Bioorganic Chemistry from the American Chemical Society.