Biography
I completed my undergraduate studies at Brigham Young University. Initially I planned to go to medical school. I took a molecular biology course from Dr. Laura Bridgewater in the College of Life Sciences. In my molecular biology textbook, I saw my first protein, a ribbon diagram of a DNA binding protein. As a kid, all I ever wanted for Christmas or birthdays were Legos. Once I learned about proteins, I knew that I wanted to engineer proteins to solve biological problems, in the same way you might build something out of Legos. I chose to go to graduate school and studied computational protein design with David Baker at the University of Washington. I engineered protein-based inhibitors to target the polycomb repressive complex (involved in epigenetic regulation) and Mdm2/Mdmx (involved in p53 regulation). Then, at Montana State University, I studied radical SAM enzymology with Joan Broderick and protein crystallography with Martin Lawrence. I developed a variant of pyruvate formate-lyase activating enzyme that readily forms diffraction-quality crystals and solved its structure with various ligands bound to the active site. In the middle of all of this, my wife, Amelia, and I had two daughters, Genevieve and Giselle. To pay for all of that, I usually had multiple jobs on the side. I tutored and managed an apartment complex while in graduate school and I was a part-time school bus driver during my postdoctoral work. When I’m not doing protein engineering, I enjoy spending time with my family, singing, drawing, running, hiking, camping, and playing with Legos with my daughters.