Emily Balskus

A recent achievement (2019) of the Balskus lab was elucidating the mechanism by which the genotoxin, colibactin, damages DNA. They found that a cyclopropane "warhead" breaks the DNA strands through an alkylation reaction. Other areas of research investigated by the Balkus lab is microbe drug metabolism. In an interview with The Scientist magazine, Balskus pointed out that many drugs such as digoxin and byproducts of human metabolism can be degraded by gut bacteria, leading to lowered effects of these molecules than would be expected. Overall, the work done by the Balskus lab presents the foundational strategies needed to investigate the human microbiome and to understand how it affects our health. Their hope is to influence the development of therapeutic strategies that work not on the human host, but on their microbiome instead.

Balskus was a co-organizer of the 2019 Keystone Conference on chemical and biological considerations of the gut microbiota. The major charge of this conference was to "...adopt other disciplines" such as xenobiology, ecology, and interspecies communication to improve the field of microbiome research.

Balskus received a B.A. with highest honor in chemistry, summa cum laude, in 2002 from Williams College, where she published her first paper on the synthesis of (-)-hennoxazole A in the lab of professor Thomas E. Smith. She then went on to the University of Cambridge as a Churchill Scholar where she earned a M.Phil. in chemistry in the lab of Steven V. Ley. Balskus received her Ph.D. with organic chemist, Eric Jacobsen, at Harvard in 2008. There she proposed the novel idea of using an asymmetric catalyst to control chemical bond formation across large, cyclic molecules to form the favored stereoisomer. She then made the switch from organic chemistry to chemical biology as she pursued a postdoctoral fellowship from 2008 through 2011 at Harvard Medical School with natural products researcher Christopher Walsh. Together they collaborated on the biosynthesis of scytonemin, a "microbial sunscreen" used to protect microorganisms from harmful UV light. In 2009 she became a member of the Microbial Diversity Summer Course at the Marine Biology Lab at Woods Hole and received training in microbial ecology and environmental microbiology.

Emily P. Balskus is an American chemical biologist, enzymologist, microbiologist, and biochemist born in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1980. She has been on the faculty of the Chemistry and Chemical Biology department of Harvard University since 2011 and is currently the Morris Kahn Associate Professor. She has published more than 80 peer-reviewed papers and three book chapters. Since 2012 she has been invited to give over 170 lectures, has held positions on various editorial boards, and served as a reviewer for ACS and Nature journals among others. Balskus also currently serves as a consultant for Novartis, Kintai Therapeutics, and Merck & Co. View her full CV here.