2023 NAS Awards Ceremony: Kevan M. Shokat, NAS Award for Scientific Discovery

Shokat is a pioneer of modern chemical biology, using innovative approaches to develop powerful molecular tools to advance basic knowledge and combat devastating diseases.

Shokat, a professor at both the University of California, San Francisco, and the University of California, Berkeley, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, has established an innovative and productive interdisciplinary research program that has produced an array of powerful chemical methods for studying cell biology. Early in his career, Shokat developed orthogonal kinase-substrate pairs, powerfully demonstrating how useful chemogenetic tools could be in dissecting complex signaling pathways in vivo.

Shokat’s recent discovery of inhibitors targeted to the commonly mutated cancer oncogene, K-Ras, has led to the discovery of the first drugs against a target previously considered undruggable. This breakthrough has led to a revolutionary new approach to cancer treatment that is already having a major medical impact.