Stephen L. Mayo
California Institute of Technology
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Primary Section: 29, Biophysics and Computational Biology Secondary Section: 21, Biochemistry Membership Type:
Member
(elected 2004)
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Biosketch
Stephen L. Mayo is the Bren Professor of Biology and Chemistry at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California. He holds joint appointments in the Division of Biology and Biological Engineering and the Division of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering. He has been a member of the Caltech faculty since 1992 and served as Vice Provost for Research from 2007 to 2010 and Chair of the Division of Biology and Biological Engineering from 2010 to 2020. He received his undergraduate degree in chemistry from the Pennsylvania State University, his Ph.D. in chemistry from Caltech, and did postdoctoral work at both UC Berkeley and Stanford University School of Medicine. Mayo's research focuses on the development of computational approaches to protein engineering – a field that has broad applications ranging from advanced biofuels to human therapeutics. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2004 for his pioneering contributions in the field of protein design. He co-founded: Molecular Simulations Inc. (currently Accelrys/Biovia), a computational chemistry company; Xencor, a publicly traded bio-therapeutics company focused on developing next generation biologics for treating cancer; and, Protabit, a privately held protein engineering company.
Research Interests
The focus of the lab is the coupling of theoretical, computational, and experimental techniques for the study of structural biology. In particular, we have placed a major emphasis on developing quantitative methods for protein design with the goal of developing a fully systematic design strategy that we call "protein design automation." Our design approach has been refined and captured in a software program called TRIAD and has been applied to a variety of problems ranging from antibody engineering to the creation of de novo enzymes.
