Khaled A. Shaaban, PhD

Associate Professor

Dr. Shaaban obtained his B.S. degree in Chemistry (2000) from Mansoura University, Egypt. He received his M.S. (2005) and PhD. degrees in Organic Chemistry (2009) from the University of Göttingen (Germany) under supervision of Professor Hartmut Laatsch. He joined Prof. Jürgen Rohr’s group to continue natural product research as a postdoctoral fellow (2009-2011) at the University of Kentucky prior to joining Prof. Ben Shen’s group (2011–2012) at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI), Florida (USA). Currently, Dr. Shaaban holds a Research Associate Professor position at the University of Kentucky College of Pharmacy, and also serves as the Director of the Center for Pharmaceutical Research and Innovation (CPRI) Natural Product Repository initiative. His expertise is in the area of natural product discovery, natural product biosynthesis and natural product-based lead discovery. Dr. Shaaban has over 20 years of experience in NPs-based drug discovery, including isolation of bacterial strains from soils, screening, scale-up fermentation, complex NP structure elucidation, biosynthesis and semi-synthesis. Within this context in his current position at CPRI is focusing on microbial natural product discovery from unique ecological environments and to build-up a natural products repository initiative that contains bacterial strains, extracts and pure compounds. Dr. Shaaban has established and validated a streamlined metabolomics-based process for microbial strain dereplication to improve discovery rates of structurally/functionally novel natural products and the corresponding CPRI Natural Products Repository infrastructure and standard operating protocols (e.g., compound/strain deposition, tracking and quality control, as well the electronic database framework for compound structure and data/project management). He has published >95 peer-reviewed high impact research articles and mentored 5 high school students, 8 Ph.D. students, 8 postdoctoral fellows, 8 visiting scholars, and 5 junior faculty members. In addition, through his CPRI role, Dr. Shaaban has effectively managed >10 diverse multi-investigator projects that engage investigators ranging from basic scientists (e.g., geologists, chemists, microbiologists, pharmacologists and pharmaceutical scientists) to clinicians.

PUBLICATIONS