Skills
Proteomics
Software Engineering
Chemical Biology
Data Engineering
Education
2015 - 2021
PhD in Chemical Biology, The Scripps Research Institute
2011 - 2015
BS in Biochemistry and BA in Chemistry, Virginia Polytechnic
Institute & State University
Experience
Jan 2022 - Present
Informatics Scientist at Belharra Therapuetics
- Engineering lead responsible for the design and implementation of Belharra's business-critical data platform
- Built a statistical framework for analyzing Belharra's proteomics data
- Utilize CI/infrastructure-as-code to deploy serverless APIs and data pipelines (Rust, Python) to AWS
- Develop front-end application to browse and interactively query multiplexed proteomics data (Typescript/Vue.js)
Jul 2021 - Jan 2022
Software Architecture Consultant at Inception Therapuetics
- Provided strategic insights to executive leadership and board of directors on developing a chemical proteomics platform and accompanying data architecture/software infrastructure
Sep 2015 - Dec 2021
PhD Candidate at Scripps Research with Prof. Benjamin F Cravatt III
- My thesis work entailed the development of a novel chemoproteomics platform for the discovery of druggable protein-protein interactions. This work represents the first strategy to perform unbiased, proteome-wide profiling of protein-protein interactions in native biological contexts in response to small molecules. This platform has been applied to discover first-in-class chemical probes that disrupt protein-protein interactions for previously undruggable targets (immunology and oncology), inducing downstream functional effects.
- Successfully deployed a 100M row PostgreSQL database backing microservices written in Rust, Haskell, and Python (Django), along with a frontend written in Typescript (Vue/JQuery) to interactively analyze multiplexed mass spectrometry data and integrate with external omics databases.
- Served as a primary bioinformatics contact for the Cravatt research group, analyzing data for multiple peer-reviewed papers.
- Gained extensive experience and training in chemical biology, mass spectrometry, flow cytometry, biochemical assays
May 2014 - May 2015
Research Assistant, Organic Chemistry at Virginia Tech
Dec 2011 - May 2014
Research Assistant, Biochemistry at Virginia Tech
Honors, Awards, and Service
2022
15th Winter Conference on Medicinal & Bioorganic Chemistry - Invited Plenary
Speaker
2022
Scripps Research Institute Symposium - $3000 award for best talk
2015 - 2020
President & Co-founder - TSRI Outdoor Club
2015
Golden Key International Honor Society - Service Chair, Virginia Tech chapter
2011 - 2015
Dean's List - Virginia Tech
2014
William E. Newton Scholarship - Awarded for undergraduate research at Virginia Tech
2010
Eagle Scout
Selected Publications
2020-2022
For a full list, see ORCID
Lazear MR*, Remsberg JR*, DeMeester KE, Njomen E, Hogg
SJ,
Whitby LR, Schafroth MA, Ogasawara D, Yokoyama M, Li H, Germain J, Barbas S,
Hanigan TW, Vartabedian VF, Reinhardt CJ, Dix MM, Koo SJ, Heo I, Teijaro JR,
Simon GM, Ghosh B, Abdel-Wahab O, Ahn K, Melillo B, Schreiber SL, Cravatt BF.
Function-first proteomic strategies for chemical probe discovery in human
cells. Under Review. 2022
Abbasov ME, Kavanagh ME, Ichu TA, Lazear MR, Tao Y, Crowley VM, Am Ende CW,
Hacker SM, Ho J,
Dix MM, Suciu R, Hayward MM, Kiessling LL, Cravatt BF. A proteome-wide atlas
of
lysine-reactive chemistry. Nat Chem. 2021 Nov;13(11):1081-1092.
Vinogradova EV, Zhang X, Remillard D, Lazar DC, Suciu RM, Wang Y, Bianco G, Yamashita Y,
Crowley VM, Schafroth MA, Yokoyama M, Konrad DB, Lum KM, Simon GM, Kemper EK,
Lazear MR, Yin S, Blewett MM, Dix MM, Nguyen N, Shokhirev MN, Chin EN,
Lairson LL, Melillo B, Schreiber SL, Forli S, Teijaro JR, Cravatt BF. An
Activity-Guided
Map of Electrophile-Cysteine Interactions in Primary Human T Cells. Cell.
2020 Aug
20;182(4):1009-1026.e29.