Evan D. Kharasch, MD, PhD is the Merel H. Harmel Professor of Anesthesiology and Vice Chair for Innovation in the Department of Anesthesiology at Duke University School of Medicine.  He is the Editor-in-Chief of Anesthesiology, the leading journal in the specialty.  He is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine (Institute 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, founding Director of the Division of Clinical and Translational Research in Anesthesiology, and creator/founding Director of The Center for Clinical Pharmacology.  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.

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, pharmacokinetics, pharmacodynamics, pharmacogenetics, toxicity, drug interactions, and variability in patient response, as well as perioperative pain and analgesia. His research led to the regulatory approval of sevoflurane, the most widely used volatile anesthetic in the world, having benefitted more than 1 billion patients.  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 300 research papers, as well as numerous book chapters, and the editor of two major textbooks on anesthetic pharmacology. His research has been continuously federally funded for more than three decades.