Stanford ChEM-H: Chemistry, Engineering & Medicine for Human Health

By Amy Adams

Chaitan Khosla directs Stanford ChEM-H, which encourages interdisciplinary research among the schools of Medicine, Engineering and Humanities & Sciences.

Last summer Stanford launched the Institute for Chemical Biology as a joint venture of the schools of Medicine, Engineering and Humanities & Sciences with the goal of encouraging interdisciplinary research and training at a new frontier of chemistry, that of human health. Given a year to mature, the institute is relaunching under a new name that better reflects this vision: Stanford ChEM-H.

Stanford Report spoke with the institute's director, Chaitan Khosla (the Wells H. Rauser and Harold M. Petiprin Professor in the School of Engineering and professor of chemistry), about the new name, his goals for the ChEM-H and the challenge of bridging the worlds of chemistry and biology.

ChEM-H is an unusual term. What does it represent?

The term ChEM-H has two meanings. In one, it is shorthand for an emerging interdisciplinary area of chemistry that this institute will support; that is, using the principles and tools of chemistry to better understand and advance human health. It is also an acronym for the fields that will need to come together for us to be successful (chemistry, engineering and medicine for human health).

Stanford is in a unique position to bring those fields together in a meaningful way. We have strong schools of Medicine, Engineering and Humanities & Sciences, all within walking distance. We are also very close to SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, where researchers can visualize individual molecules of life and their interactions in unprecedented atomic detail.

You've talked about a new frontier in chemistry. What do you mean by that?

The core value of chemistry remains timeless, even to a high school student. Chemistry is the science that makes new forms of matter and measures its properties at an atomic level. That said, I see the field of chemistry as being at an inflection point analogous to a period of time immediately after the transistor was invented. As mathematicians started to recognize the capabilities of this device, the field of computer science emerged.

In a similar way, the human genome project has created a resource that opens the door to understanding human biology in the language of chemistry. Up to this point, the impact of chemistry on our world has been profoundall the synthetic products we use in our daily lives are a result of chemical ingenuity. This, of course, includes a vast majority of medicines that society has come to rely upon so heavily. I predict that the emerging frontier between chemistry and human biology will challenge future generations of chemists and molecular engineers to elevate their design, synthetic and analytical skills to new heights. In turn, these pursuits will fundamentally alter our understanding of who we are as a species and as individuals.

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Stanford ChEM-H: Chemistry, Engineering & Medicine for Human Health