The Distinguished Alumni Award is the highest honor the Institute bestows upon a graduate, and is in recognition of "a particular achievement of noteworthy value,
a series of such achievements, or a career of noteworthy accomplishment." Selections are made by a faculty and alumni committee and confirmed by the Board of Trustees.
Since the award's inception in 1966 Caltech has recognized a total of 221 alumni as standouts in science, engineering, business and the arts.
Awarded 2000
Chaitan Khosla is Professor of Chemistry, Chemical Engineering, and, by courtesy, of Biochemistry at Stanford University. He received his PhD in 1990 at Caltech. After completing postdoctoral studies at the John Innes Centre in the UK, he joined Stanford in 1992. Over the past two decades he has studied polyketide synthases as paradigms for modular catalysis, and has exploited their properties for engineering novel antibiotics.