James Geoghegan

At Dartmouth I was fortunate to perform my PhD studies in the Supattapone laboratory studying the molecular mechanisms of prion formation. Dr. Supattapone was an outstanding mentor and I gained invaluable experience and training working with him and the other members of the lab. Beyond the  Supatapone lab, the Biochemistry department was a welcoming and engaging scientific environment in which to work. I look fondly on my time at Dartmouth as a member of the MCB program. Soon after graduation, I transitioned to an industrial postdoctoral position at Adimab, which had recently been co-founded by Tillman Gerngross, of the Thayer school. There, I worked on developing Adimab's antibody discovery and engineering platform. Following my postdoc at Adimab, I transitioned to a position as an academic postdoc in Beverly Davidson's laboratory at the University of Iowa. The Davidson lab is focused on developing gene therapies to treat neurodegenerative disorders and I worked on projects related to engineering of AAV vectors for brain delivery of therapeutic molecules. After four years in the Davidson lab I moved back to industry, joining the Antibody Discovery and Protein Engineering department at MedImmune (now AstraZeneca). My focus at MedImmune was around characterizing the biophysical properties of candidate drugs (monoclonal antibodies or other protein-based drugs) to understand whether a given molecule had the necessary attributes to warrant selection for clinical development. Later, I returned to Adimab where, as a senior scientist, I lead a research group composed of PhD scientists and technicians. During the last six years I have worked in therapeutic antibody discovery and engineering for our business partners and, more recently, conducting technology development research in the field of antibody science.  The field of biologics, in particular antibody therapies, is exciting and growing and I feel lucky to have been able to apply my training in biochemistry to this scientific area.