Seth Harris

My research in structural biology spans neurobiology, angiogenesis, oncology, epigenetics, cancer immunology, infectious diseases and beyond. We collaborate with diverse colleagues to enable complementary studies of structure and function beyond our crystallography focus, including cryo electron microscopy, NMR, and biophysical techniques. On the technical front, I work to develop tools that can streamline and help us understand cohorts of numerous structures and their conformational variations. My group has helped develop the implementation of acoustic liquid transfer technologies in aid of protein crystallization, allowing nanoliter-scale trials efficiently to identify crystallization conditions.

With this as a platform, we work with medicinal and computational chemists in rational drug design, solving co-crystal structures of diverse compounds in complex with target proteins. I chair our biophysics workgroup that focuses on using fragment screening to identify ligand efficient starting molecules for that purpose as well. My interest in computational aspects of structural datasets also led to our contribution of a large cohort of kinase structures to the inaugural public blind challenge event organized by the Drug Design Data Resource (D3R) group.

On the large molecule front, my group determines antibody:antigen complexes to elucidate the nature of epitope recognition and how to improve, for instance, a dual-acting antibody fragment that can potently recognize two distinct antigens. My lab also recently determined novel structures of large protein complexes involved in deubiquitination, establishing a foundation for further investigations via postdoctoral research within my group.

• University of California, San Francisco, Helen Hay Whitney Postdoctoral Fellow – 1999-2004
• University of California, Berkeley, Ph.D. – 1994-1999
• Yale University, B.S. Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry and Studies in the Environment. – 1988-1992

• Helen Hay Whitney Postdoctoral Fellow – 1999-2004
• Poster Prizes, Advanced Light Source and Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory Users’ Meetings – 1998