Scientist interesting in building new technology to reveal the structure, dynamics, and function of life at the molecular scale.

I am currently starting up the Reciprocal Space Station Consortium and leading the photobiology (PBIO) group at the Deutsches Elektronen Synchrotron, DESY. Previously, I was a principal scientist at CHARM Therapeutics and a staff scientist at the the world’s first hard X-ray free electron laser, the LCLS. During my PhD, I studied at Stanford under Vijay Pande and worked as part of the Folding@home team.

Research

Life consumes energy and information in a quest to survive and replicate. The process is inherently idiosyncratic and therefore unpredictable: random evolutionary processes have given us the species of today. that contingency makes it impossible to predict too much about how life will be; we can’t build theory from universal laws like we do in physics. As a consequence, observation is primary in any effort to understand biology.

My goal is to push our ability to see biology take place, at the most fundamental scale: that of atoms. To do so, we need to build new hardware and software. Excitingly, unlocked by AI, imaging at the atomic scale – structural biology – is undergoing a paradigm shift, moving from single, static structures to seeing biomolecules in action as they change conformation, composition, and context.

On the software side, along with a fantastic team I am building the Reciprocal Space Station Consortium. RSS aims to connect structural biology to the power of scientific computing and AI to enable structural biology to cross the single-structure frontier.

On the hardware side, my team at DESY is working on developing:

1. time-resolved serial femtosecond crystallography (SFX) of photoactive proteins
2. “statistical crystallography”, where we extract allosteric and dynamical information from large numbers of crystals subjected to perturbation

Consulting

In addition to expertise in frontier structural biology, I have industry experience developing corporate technical strategy, with a focus on the challenging but exciting intersection of machine learning and biology. Reach out by email to inquire.