Chad A. Mirkin, PhD is the Director of the International Institute for Nanotechnology and the Rathmann Professor of Chemistry and Medicine at Northwestern University. He is known for his invention and development of spherical nucleic acids (SNAs), which form a basis for the field of structural nanomedicine. SNAs have been used as extra- and intracellular probes and as therapeutic agents for the treatment of cancers, neurological diseases, infectious diseases, and skin disorders via gene regulation, gene editing, immunotherapy, and chemotherapy.

He has authored >940 papers and >1,470 patents worldwide (457 issued) and founded 11 companies, that have commercialized over 2,000 products (including SNA drugs in seven clinical trials). Prof. Mirkin has been recognized with over 250 national and international awards including the ACS Priestley Medal, the Harvey Prize, the Kavli Prize in Nanoscience, the Dan David Prize, the National Academy of Sciences Sackler Prize in Convergence Research, and the King Faisal Prize from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. He served for eight years on the President’s Council of Advisors on Science & Technology, and he is one of very few scientists to be elected to all three US National Academies and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Mirkin has served on the Editorial Advisory Boards of over 35 scholarly journals, is the founding editor of the journal Small, was associate editor of JACS for 8 years, and was a Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA Editorial Board Member. He has given >1,000 invited lectures and educated >360 graduate students and postdocs. Over 170 of his former students hold faculty positions around the globe.