Awarded in 2026
Home Department: Chemical & Systems Biology
Faculty Advisors: Polly Fordyce (Bioengineering and Genetics) and Dmitri Petrov (Biology)

Research Title: Disentangling the Biophysical Drivers of Evolution Through High-Resolution Mapping of Natural Selection to Protein Functional Architecture

Evolution has yielded proteins with diverse molecular functions that remain intractable to rational design, yet how it navigates complex physical constraints to do so is unclear. To understand this process, Alan’s research maps historical signatures of natural selection from population-scale sequencing to measurable changes in the physical processes that underlie molecular function. This mechanistic link would inform the design of new modalities in protein-based therapeutics and industrial tools by learning from natural evolution.