About
More about me.
I love to tinker and build things, and watch them do work that existing toolsets couldn’t tackle. In medicine, tinkering with molecules can launch total modality shifts – from chemicals to biologics, then siRNA and antisense, then gene editing – creating true unlocks of biological control. We’ve become better and better at hitting these technological inflection points, of late pushing faster than ever with serious (and vociferously advertised) computational tailwinds, but we remain essentially stagnated when it comes to selecting which targets need hitting in the first place. But this is a bio, not an opinion piece, so more on that later.
For the better part of a decade I’ve been a high-throughput tinkerer, designing and running highly parallel synthetic biology pipelines to discover peptide bits and protein bobs that mute or unmute target genes. The goal is epigenetic editors able to conduct the orchestra of gene expression, smoothing out the rough notes that cause disease, and doing so more safely than is possible with ‘conventional’ gene editing systems like CRISPR-Cas9, base editing, or gene replacement therapy. By editing the epigenome, we can fine-tune the genetic program without cutting or damaging the DNA.
At Epicrispr Biotechnologies, I led proteomic screening and engineering campaigns and established key elements of the discovery platform that underlies EPI-321, a silencer now in First-in-Human trials for facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy, and EPI-331, a durable gene activator heading toward Duchenne. Then as Founding Head of Research at General Control, I led a team applying accelerated discovery pipelines to generate best-in-class epigenetic editors against a handful of cardiovascular, aging, and longevity-related targets, by installing the power of gene modulation into safer and more widely tolerable vehicles of drug delivery amenable to large patient-base disease indications and multiplexed targeting. Because most common diseases of aging are multifactorial, the ability to precisely modulate multiple genes in parallel is a major therapeutic advantage.
Prior to the Bay and biotech startups, I earned a PhD in Human Genetics at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Here I studied Mendelian disorders of chromatin machinery, where genetic mutations in epigenetic regulatory proteins result in highly variable developmental conditions across many bodily systems. I focused in particular on a histone methyltransferase protein and its role in neural stem cell development, discovering aberrant mechanisms of oxygen sensing to be a key factor in the onset of that disease. I later began a postdoctoral fellowship at UCSF, integrating genome-scale, multi-omics datasets into a machine-learning classifier to decipher the roles of protein-coding versus long non-coding RNA genes in neuronal differentiation – but quickly thereafter I followed the call to industry.
Outside of these, I'm a road-trip aficionado and extreme-temperature connoisseur, and I pursue a passionate affection for diving – with, and especially without, air – at depth, as a means to deeply connect with physiology and its relation to the mind. Freediving is a small sport that can profoundly influence our conceptions of biological limits and how to surpass them.