Kim Lewis is a University Distinguished Professor and Director, Antimicrobial Discovery Center at Northeastern University in Boston. He is a Fellow of the American Society of Microbiology, and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is a Highly Cited Researcher (Clarivate Analytics) and an Expertscape World Expert in Microbial Drug Resistance (top 0.1% of scholars in the field).
He obtained his Ph.D. in Biochemistry from Moscow University in 1980, and has been on the Faculty of MIT, University of Maryland, and Tufts University prior to coming to Northeastern.
Dr. Lewis has authored over one hundred papers and is an inventor on several patents. His notable findings include the development of general methods to grow previously uncultured bacteria that make up >99% of biodiversity on the planet, the identification of the culprit of recalcitrant biofilm infections, drug-tolerant persister cells; and several novel antibiotics, including teixobactin and darobactin.
Dr. Lewis has served as a panelist and contributor to reports on antimicrobial resistance (AMR) by the National Academies Institute of Medicine, the Pew Charitable Trust, and the European Academies of Science. Dr. Lewis is a member of Faculty 1000, a worldwide panel of experts evaluating research advancements. He is a recipient of the MIT C.E. Reed Faculty Initiative Award, the NIH Director’s Transformative Award, and the American Society for Microbiology Applied Biology and Biotechnology Research Award.
Apart from his work in Academia, Dr. Lewis has served as a consultant to the Pharmaceutical Industry, The Biotech, and is a co-founder of NovoBiotic Pharmaceuticals, Arietis Pharma, Holobiome, Flightpath and Odyssey Therapeutics.