Krishna Mahadevan is a Professor in the Departments of Chemical Engineering & Applied Chemistry, and Institute of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Toronto and is a Canada Research Chair in Metabolic Systems Engineering. He obtained his B. Tech from Indian Institute of Technology, Madras in Chemical Engineering in 1997 and then obtained his Ph.D. degree from the University of Delaware in Chemical Engineering in 2002. He was a research scientist at Genomatica Inc., San Diego from 2002–06 and has also held appointments as a visiting scholar and a guest lecturer at the Department of Bioengineering in the University of California, San Diego, and in the Department of Microbiology, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

His research interests are in the area of modeling, analysis and optimization of metabolism for applications in bioremediation, biochemicals production and medicine and has published over 150 articles in these areas. He also serves as Associate Editor for ACS Synthetic Biology. He received the Jay Bailey Young Investigator Award in Metabolic Engineering in 2010, Society of Industrial Microbiology and Biotechnology’s Young Investigator Award in 2012, University of Toronto FASE Research Leaders Award in 2013, the Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship in 2014, the Syncrude Innovation Award in 2014, Biochemical Engineering Journal Young Investigator award in 2017, D.G. Fisher Award in 2021 and the Miller Visiting Professorship from UC Berkeley in 2022.