Emad Tajkhorshid is Hastings Endowed Chair in the Biochemistry Department, as well as holds additional appointments across multiple colleges that include Chemistry, Bioengineering, Pharmacology, Biophysics and Quantitative Biology, Computational Science and Engineering, and the Carle-Illinois College of Medicine at the University of Illinois. He is also a full time faculty member of the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology. He joined the faculty of the Departments of Biochemistry (LAS) and Pharmacology (UI COM) in 2007 and was fast tracked to associate professor with tenure in 2010 and then again to the rank of professor in 2013. His tenure dossier was selected as one of the two top UIUC tenure cases on campus. In 2015, Professor Tajkhorshid was named a University of Illinois Scholar, after being nominated by both UIUC and UIC campuses. In 2016, he was awarded the Faculty Excellence Award from the School of Molecular and Cellular Biology at UIUC. Later that year he was named Endowed Chair in Biochemistry. Emad Tajkhorshid directs the leads the NIH Center for Macromolecular Modeling and Bioinformatics and the Computational Structural Biology and Molecular Biophysics Group at the Beckman Institute. Dr. Tajkhorshid has authored nearly 300 research articles (H-index 78) with over 37,000 citations in such high profile journals as Nature, Science, Cell, eLife, and PNAS. He has delivered nearly 200 invited lectures at international meetings, universities, and research institutes. He has served on the Editorial Boards of multiple major journals, including Biophysical Journal, Journal of Biological Chemistry, PLoS Computational Biology, and Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communication.

B.S. 1989 Tehran University
Ph.D. 2001 University of Heidelberg
Postdoc. 2000-2003 Univ. of Illinois, U-C

Research Areas

Drug Discovery, Infectious Diseases, Ion Channels, Membrane Biology, Molecular Pharmacology, Neuroscience, Protein Biochemistry and Protein Structure, Signal Transduction, Virology

The Tajkhorshid Group focuses on developing and applying advanced computational techniques to characterization of biological phenomena, particularly membranes and membrane proteins, with the aim of achieving the most detailed microscopic view of structural and dynamical bases underlying biological function. Major areas of his extensive research portfolio, which have enjoyed continuous support from multiple federal funding agencies (NIH, NSF, DOE, DOD) over many years, include mechanistic studies of membrane transport proteins, principles of energy transduction and coupling in bioenergetic proteins, and lipid modulation of protein function, e.g., in signaling proteins associated with the cellular membrane.

NIH Transformative Award, 2017-2022
Endowed Chair of Biochemistry, 2016-
MCB Faculty Excellence Award, 2016
University of Illinois Scholar, 2015-2018
UIUC top tenure packages of the year, 2010

3147 Beckman Institute, MC-251
405 N. Mathews Ave.
Urbana, IL 61801

(217) 244-6914