Scientific Advisory Board

Matthew D. Shair, Ph.D., Founder, Chairman of the Scientific Advisory Board

Dr. Shair is Professor of Chemistry in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard University. He was also a founding faculty member of the Institute of Chemistry and Cell Biology at Harvard University. Professor Shair received his Ph.D. with Dr. Sam Danishefsky from Columbia University, and received an M.S. degree from Yale University. He continued his post-doctoral work as a National Institutes of Health (NIH) fellow in the lab of Stuart Schreiber at Harvard, helping pioneer the development of diversity oriented synthesis and chemical genetics. In 1997, he was appointed Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard University and was promoted to Professor with tenure in 2002. Professor Shair’s laboratory works on the synthesis of small molecules, many of them natural products, which are useful in studying cell biology. His lab is also studying the cellular target and mechanism of natural products that have unique biological properties. His lab completed syntheses of the natural products CP-263,114 and longithorone, has developed new reactions in organic synthesis, and they have, in collaboration with Tom Kirchhausen's lab at Harvard Medical School, discovered small molecules for studying aspects of vesicular traffic and Golgi organization. Dr. Shair’s awards include the Dreyfus New Faculty Award and the Dreyfus Teacher Scholar Award, a Sloan Foundation Fellowship, the Bristol-Myers Squibb Award in Organic Synthesis, an Eli Lilly Grantee Award, the Astra-Zeneca Excellence in Chemistry Award, and the ACS Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award.  Professor Shair was one of the founding scientists of Infinity Pharmaceuticals, Inc. where he is currently an advisor.  Professor Shair is also an advisor to Enanta Pharmaceuticals and Novartis.

Randall W. King, M.D., Ph.D., Founder, member Scientific Advisory Board

Dr. King is an Associate Professor of Cell Biology at Harvard Medical School. He received his undergraduate degree in Chemistry from Carleton College in Northfield Minnesota. He obtained his PhD from the University of California, San Francisco, studying the role of ubiquitin-dependent proteolysis in cell cycle control under the guidance of Marc Kirschner. These studies included the identification and first molecular characterization of the Anaphase-Promoting Complex, a multisubunit ubiquitin ligase that regulates mitotic progression.  Additional work included the development of a novel in vitro expression cloning system that has been widely used to identify the substrates of proteases and kinases. Dr. King then obtained his MD degree from Harvard Medical School.

In 1997, Dr. King became the first independent fellow at the Institute of Chemistry and Cell Biology, working with Professors Tim Mitchison and Stuart Schreiber to develop new approaches in chemical genetics. His research group  developed several instruments used for the synthesis and screening of arrayed split-pool chemical libraries, and  employed high-throughput assays to identify small molecules that affect cell cycle progression and chromosome  segregation. He was subsequently appointed as the Harry C. McKenzie Assistant Professor of Cell Biology at Harvard Medical School.

His laboratory continues to develop novel chemical tools to study ubiquitin-dependent protein breakdown and cell division. His group recently used a chemical genetic approach to identify ubistatins, small molecules which block proteasome-dependent degradation by binding the ubiquitin chain. The laboratory is currently using high-throughput siRNA screening to identify new genes required for division of cancer cells, and has developed long-term time lapse imaging techniques to study the role of these genes in cell division.

Gavin MacBeath Ph.D., Founder, member Scientific Advisory Board

Dr. MacBeath is an Associate Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard University. He is also an Associate Member of the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT. Professor MacBeath received his B.Sc. (Honors) degree in Genetics from the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada in 1991 and his Ph.D. in Macromolecular and Cellular Structure and Chemistry with Dr. Don Hilvert at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, CA in 1997. He then pursued post-doctoral work as a Cancer Research Institute postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Stuart Schreiber at Harvard, where he developed small molecule microarray technology for high-throughput screening. In 2000, Dr. MacBeath was hired as the first research fellow at the Bauer Center for Genomics Research and in 2002 he was appointed Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard University. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 2006. Over the past four years, Dr. MacBeath’s lab has pioneered the development of protein microarray technology and is currently using this technology to gain a more integrated understanding of how protein networks control complex biological processes. He is also interfacing protein microarray technology with high-throughput screening to extend the field of chemical genomics. Dr. MacBeath is the recipient of numerous awards, including the W.M. Keck Foundation Distinguished Young Scholars in Medical Research Award, the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation Young Investigator Award, and the Smith Family New Investigator Award. He is also the recipient of the TR100 award, where he was named one of the top 100 young innovators in technology and business by MIT’s Technology Review Magazine. Professor MacBeath is a founding member of Merrimack Pharmaceuticals, Inc. where he is currently an advisor. He is also an advisor to Nephromics, LLC.