Michael Lazear

About Michael Lazear

I am a cross-functional scientist/software engineer with expertise in chemical biology, high-throughput proteomics, scientific software development, and machine learning.I received my Ph.D. in Chemical Biology at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California where I worked with Prof. Benjamin Cravatt. My thesis work entailed the development of a novel \"function-first\" proteomic platform for the discovery of ligandable protein-protein interactions. This platform has been applied to discover first in class chemical probes that disrupt disease-relevant protein-protein interactions. Prior to my Ph.D, I graduated Summa Cum Laude from the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in May 2015 with dual degrees in Biochemistry and Chemistry. While at Virginia Tech, I performed undergraduate research in two academic labs, gaining experience in molecular biology and organic synthesis techniques. In addition to my research experience, I have been programming for more than 15 years using Rust, Typescript, C, Python, SQL, and additional languages. During my Ph.D, I developed several web-based, interactive data exploration applications for aggregation and analysis of multiplexed proteomics data that have seen extensive use. Outside of scientific applications, I have worked on operating systems, programming language development, automated trading systems, and contributed to several open source projects.

Experience

1. Director, Computational Proteomics

   Proxima

   Feb 2026 — Present

Education

• Virginia Tech

  Bachelor's degree, Biochemistry

  2011 — 2015

• Scripps Research

  Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Chemical Biology

Skills

• Protein Purification
• Molecular Cloning
• Biochemistry
• Proteomics
• Pcr
• Microsoft Office
• Solid Phase Synthesis
• Research
• Protein Expression
• Molecular Biology
• Organic Chemistry
• Peptide Synthesis