Evan Kharasch
MD PhD
Evan D. Kharasch, MD, PhD is Professor and Vice Chair for Innovation in the Department of Anesthesiology at Duke University, and also the Director of Academic Entrepreneurship in Duke University School of Medicine. Before joining Duke in 2018, Dr. Kharasch was at Washington University in St. Louis where he was the Russell D. and Mary B. Shelden Professor of Anesthesiology. He also created and was the founding Director of The Center for Clinical Pharmacology, a joint endeavor between the St. Louis College of Pharmacy and Washington University in St. Louis, and was the founding Director of the Division of Clinical and Translational Research in Anesthesiology. He also served as the Vice Chancellor for Research at Washington University in St. Louis. Prior to that, he was Professor of Anesthesiology, Vice-Chair for Research, and Assistant Dean for Clinical Research in the School of Medicine, at the University of Washington. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Anesthesiology, the leading journal in the specialty.
Dr. Kharasch leads an active research program in basic, translational and clinical pharmacology, and is a practicing anesthesiologist. His research broadly addresses anesthetic and analgesic drugs and addiction therapies, directed towards optimizing drug disposition, drug safety, clinical effectiveness and patient satisfaction. Specific interests include drug metabolism and transport (hepatic, renal, intestinal, and the blood-brain barrier), pharmacokinetics, pharmacodynamics, pharmacogenetics, toxicity, drug interactions, and variability in patient response, as well as perioperative pain and analgesia. His research also focuses on the development and application of novel noninvasive biomarkers and nanotechnology-based molecular diagnostics. He is the author of more than 270 research papers, as well as numerous book chapters, and is the editor of two major textbooks on anesthetic pharmacology. His research has been continuously federally funded for more than two decades. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine (Institute of Medicine).