Matthew Faber
Matthew completed his PhD under the guidance of Dr. Tim Whitehead. The primary focus of his PhD was the relationship between initial enzyme folding probability and mutational outcomes. Variants of an amidase (AmiE) with decreased in vivo folding probabilities and with statistically indistinguishable catalytic efficiencies were computationally designed. The local fitness landscapes of these variants, and the parental enzyme, were explored using deep mutational scanning. The results obtained provide a nuanced view of how folding probability constrains enzyme evolution. Matthew is now a scientist at Xencor were he is developing protein therapeutics.