Vice Provost Stephen Mayo
Stephen L. Mayo is currently Vice Provost (research) and Bren Professor of Biology and Chemistry at Caltech in Pasadena, CA, where he runs a lab of approximately fifteen graduate students, postdocs, and staff.
Dr. Mayo is a pioneer and leading figure in the field of protein design. His work at the interface of theory, computation, and experiment is aimed at understanding the physical/chemical determinants of protein structure, stability, and function. Dr. Mayo and his coworkers were the first to show that a quantitative description of protein thermodynamics could be coupled with combinatorial search techniques capable of addressing the enormous combinatorial space available to protein sequences. In their 1997 Science article, Dr. Mayo and his coworkers demonstrated the validity of their theoretical and computational approach by experimentally validating that a designed protein sequence actually folded to its intended 3-dimensional structure. This and related work have been viewed as the harbinger to a complete solution to the inverse protein-folding problem (that is, the problem of predicting amino acid sequences that will fold to specific protein structures). A solution to this problem will have a profound impact on our ability to understand the evolution of protein sequences, structures, and functions, as well as on prospects for continued development of protein-based biotechnologies.
Dr. Mayo has received a number of honors including being named a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, a Rita Allen Foundation Scholar, a David and Lucile Packard Foundation Fellow, and a Searle Scholar. In 1997 he was recognized for his pioneering work in protein design by being awarded the Johnson Foundation Prize for Innovative Research in Structural Biology. In 2004 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.
Dr. Mayo is a native of Texas, but grew up primarily in Pennsylvania and New Jersey as part of a "military" family. He earned his B.S. in Chemistry at the Pennsylvania State University, and received a Ph.D. in Chemistry from Caltech in 1987. Dr. Mayo did postdoctoral work as a Miller Fellow in the Chemistry Department at UC Berkeley. After working for two years at a software company he cofounded (Molecular Simulations, Inc.), he did additional postdoctoral work in the Biochemistry Department at Stanford University School of Medicine before returning to Caltech as an Assistant Professor of Biology in 1992. Dr. Mayo also cofounded Xencor in 1997 and served as the Chair of its Scientific Advisory Board until 2006.
More information on Dr. Mayo's research may be found on the Mayo Lab website.