Lucas is CEO and Co-Founder of Cyrus Biotechnology, providing software for protein modeling and engineering to customers in Pharma, Biotech, Synthetic Biology, Consumer Products, and Academia. Cyrus is based primarily on the Rosetta software package originated at David Baker’s laboratory at the University of Washington, along with other software packages in bioinformatics and cheminformatics that complement the functionality in Rosetta. At Cyrus, Lucas is interested in developing the next generation of Therapeutics and other protein-based technology using biophysics and computational modeling.
Prior to Cyrus, Lucas was a translational investigator at the Institute of Protein Design at the University of Washington, focusing on algorithms in computational biophysics. He completed a postdoc in the laboratory of Dr. Baker, where he designed a de novo covalent small-molecule binding protein, patented a novel computationally design fluorescent protein (with Alice Ting’s lab at MIT), and led a number of algorithm and database development projects in the Rosetta biomolecular modeling and design software package.
Lucas received a biochemistry degree summa cum laude from Harvard University, with a thesis on The Physics of DNA Translocation through Biological Nanopores. Lucas returned to Harvard and the doctoral program in biophysics, where he worked with Professors Xiaowei Zhuang and Eugene Shakhnovich to study the folding mechanisms of structured RNA molecules using novel computational techniques and single-molecule spectroscopy. Lucas is from New York City.
