Samuel Thompson

Samuel was raised in West Texas and graduated from the Texas Academy of Mathematics and Science, where they began working on functionalized polymer microgels with Zhibing Hu (University of North Texas). They earned a Chemistry degree at MIT (2012), working on protein engineering for live-cell imaging with Alice Ting and on the structural biology of CO₂-metabolizing enzyme complexes with Catherine Drennan. During a gap year at Osaka University through MISTI Japan, they developed cryo-EM analysis methods with Junichi Takagi and Kenji Iwasaki. Their Ph.D. with Tanja Kortemme at UCSF (2020) combined computational protein design with high-throughput cell-based screens to study how protein homeostasis shapes in vivo enzyme fitness landscapes. Samuel is now a postdoctoral researcher jointly with Polly Fordyce (Stanford) and David Baker (University of Washington), developing microfluidic and computational methods to engineer proteins that fold and function exclusively in organic solvents. They also build microfluidic systems for screening encapsulated in vitro reactions and cell-growth chambers on commercial FACS machines. Collaborative projects span enzyme inhibitor screens, microbial and fungal selections, and targeted drug release.