Griffin Chure, PhD
Experience
Rob Phillips Group
The short version is that I'm an anti-disciplinary scientist. The slightly longer version is that I'm a computational researcher at Profluent Bio who uses a blend of statistical inference, mathematical modeling, machine learning, and scientific software engineering to better understand the complex behavor of biological systems.
I am the progeny of two paleontologists and grew up in rural Utah, which was a unique experience. I spent my weekends helping my parents dig up dinosaur bones and my spent my weekdays in the local public education system where I was taught that evolution was a hoax and dinosaur bones were buried by either the devil or the government (or both). Contending with these opposed views of reality strongly influenced how I want to understand the world: through the cold, objective, logical lens of math.
I studied biology and chemistry at the University of Utah, then earned a PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics with Rob Phillips at Caltech, where I learned to approach biological problems from a physical and probabilistic perspective. I continued as an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow with Jonas Cremer at Stanford, studying the intersection of molecular biophysics, bacterial physiology, and evolution. I am now a senior computational research scientist at Profluent Bio where I use bioinformatics and protein language modeling to discover and design protein systems for genetic engineering.
Outside of work hours, I build and maintain scientific resources like the Human Impacts Database and hplc-py. Beyond science, I love taking photographs, making vector illustrations, and exploring the wildlands of California with my partner and our two hounds. I watch my fair share of films about which I have hard-headed opinions such as affinity for Alejandro Jodorowsky and Julia Ducournau, a distaste for Star Wars and Marvel.