We are delighted to announce that the GA Board has unanimously agreed to award the honorary membership to Prof. Dr. Ikhlas Khan from the University of Mississippi (often fondly called Ole Miss), who this year will celebrate his 65th birthday.
With this award we honour his decades of active work both in the context of medicinal plant and natural product research and his multiple contributions to the field, but especially his long-lasting support of the GA’s activities and aims. Uniquely he has had a career which spans three continents and has supported numerous students and researchers with his expertise, but also as a personal mentor. In 1991 he joined the GA. From early on he has been a very strong ‘ambassador’ of the GA and has promoted international collaboration in the field increasing the society’s visibility globally.
In response to the GA Board’s decision, Ikhlas wrote in an email:
“GA has always been at the forefront of protecting, promoting, and representing the natural product community globally. I have been part of GA for the last 40 years and humbled to receive this honour.”
We specifically recognise his broad impact at multiple levels, including in the supervision of early career researchers, the research on the authentication, cultivation, quality control (including esp. analytical fingerprinting), safety of herbal materials generally used as supplements (‘botanicals’) in the USA, which lack medical/pharmaceutical regulation.
He also leads a very active Drug Discovery Program focusing on the isolation and characterization of active metabolites with significant biological activity and the use of analytical methods in pharmacodynamic and pharmacokinetic research.
In 1980 or 45 years ago, Ikhlas received his B.Sc. Chemistry and in 1982 a M.Sc. in Organic Chemistry from Aligarh Muslim Univ., Aligarh, India. In 1987 he was award a PhD (Dr. rer nat) from the Technical University of Munich (München, West Germany working at the Institute of Pharmaceutical Biology, swiftly moving on to postdoctoral studies with Prof. Otto Sticher are the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich.
In 1992, he moved to Ole Miss, first as a research scientist, then in 1995 as a Research Assistant Professor, in 2001 he was promoted to Research Assoc. Prof. and Dir. of the FDA program, Asst. Dir. of the National Centre for Natural Products Research (NCNPR) in Oct. 2002 and to full Professor status in July 2005. In 2017, he was promoted to Director of NCNPR.
He holds several additional academic and research appointments and has authored/co-authored over 850 research articles. He has received numerous awards, including in 2009 the Norman Farnsworth Excellence in Botanical Research Award and in 2011 the Varro Tyler Prize of the ASP. He has been awarded a D. Litt (Honoris Causa) from Univ. of Hamdard, Delhi, India 2012; the National Business Journal Education Award, 2011, to name just a few.
We from the GA-extend our warmest congratulations to Ikhlas or ‘IK’, thank him for his decades of great support and also hope that this price highlights the tremendous achievements at a time which certainly are a challenge to him and many colleagues at Ole Miss and beyond, but in a year which also has been a personal challenge for him and his family.
