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Brandon got his Bachelor’s degree in biochemistry from Portland State University, where he conducted research on mitochondria with Keith Garlid. Additionally, he got an internship sponsored by the SENS Foundation, working in Henrich Jasper’s lab at the Buck Institute for Research.  While there, he worked on aging by modeling the effects of aging individual tissue on the rest of the body by using fruit flies. He received his PhD at the University of Washington in the Biochemistry department. His adviser was Frank DiMaio of the DiMaio lab. This was where he developed a novel sampling strategy for de novo, modeling of protein structures using sparse cryo electron microscopy data. Basically, he is smart and has studied a lot of different topics.

He has since started working at Cyrus Biotechnology in 2015, shortly after the company spun out of the Institute for Protein Design at UW (of which the DiMaio lab is part of).  The goal of the company is to bring the powerful tools for protein structure prediction and design found in Rosetta to industry users in an easy to use fashion with back end cloud compute.

In this podcast, he answers a lot of questions on the potential of protein engineering, how to be an evil scientist as seen in the movie Spy Kids (or the H.G. Wells novel The Island of Doctor Moreau) to create interesting organisms, where the field is going, and how each of us can help push the research forward.