Jaden Shirkey

WORK HISTORY

EDUCATION

ABOUT JADEN SHIRKEY

A passionate structural biologist who enjoys protein biochemistry and long walks on the beach. Now applying a decade of biophysics training to high-throughput antibody characterization. Princeton Ph.D. graduate from the Hughson Lab with publications in Nature and Nature Structural & Molecular Biology, and expertise in protein expression and purification, X-ray crystallography, and cryo-electron microscopy. My thesis delivered seven crystal structures across two challenging targets: AclA, a novel enzyme performing previously uncharacterized chemistry, captured in its apo, substrate-bound, product-bound, and rare catalytic-intermediate states (published in Nature); and AclR, an unstable transcription factor, captured in its apo, allosteric-intermediate, and fully activated conformations. Together these structures revealed the catalytic mechanism of AclA and the allosteric activation pathway of AclR, which I leveraged to rationally engineer two gain-of-function AclR mutants: one yielding a 5.5-fold improvement in EC50 in a cell-based assay, and another achieving constitutive activation from a single point mutation. Currently an Associate Scientist on the Advanced Characterization team at OmniAb, where I quantify the kinetics, affinities, and epitope binning profiles of diverse monoclonal antibodies by SPR and BLI on the Carterra LSA platform. I\'m learning the craft from Yasmina Abdiche and the team that helped define modern high-throughput SPR methodology. I bridge computational and experimental biology, with experience screening hundreds of AlphaFold2 predictions to discover a novel protein–protein interaction, then validating it biophysically (KD = 10.2 ± 0.7 µM by ITC). Skilled at building cross-disciplinary initiatives from the ground up: I founded a colloquium spanning six Princeton departments and served as Executive Officer of the Princeton Graduate Student Government, managing a $25K budget. Here to turn careful biophysics into better therapeutics.