This article appeared in Catalyst Magazine, Spring 2026
As an undergraduate at the University of Washington, Margaux Pinney was a chemistry major who always wanted to know more about biology. She ended up double majoring in chemistry and biochemistry, and there, she honed in on the research topic she'd dedicate her career to: enzymes.
"I was super fascinated with enzymes because they are are nature's chemists," Pinney says.
After she finished her undergraduate degree, Pinney earned a master's of science in medicine while simultaneously pursuing a Ph.D. in biochemistry at Stanford. While there, she did a clinical rotation in genetics and worked in Daniel Herschlag's lab in enzymology, prompting questions about what happens when people have mutations in enzymes. Following her Ph.D., Pinney worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford studying microfluidics and then started a lab as a Sandler Fellow and Group Leader at the University of California, San Francisco.
Pinney joined Berkeley Chemistry in 2025 as an assistant professor, and she continues leading her lab using microfluidic methods to study enzymes and proteins. Her team researches how sequence encodes function — and how they can engineer enzymes and proteins to do new things.
"This field usually moves extremely slowly," Pinney says. "Basically, if you want to understand the relationship between sequence and enzyme function, you usually have to perturb the sequence and ask, 'how does the enzyme function change?' It's cause and effect. The number of perturb-measure cycles we would need to get a clear picture of enzyme function is extremely large. The field, for the last century, has been doing this one at a time, which is super time inefficient. Emerging methods coming out of microfluidics and bioengineering enable us to do this kind of perturbation at a completely unprecedented scale."
Whereas a Ph.D. student might normally do 10-20 such perturbations at most during their studies, now they can do hundreds, or even thousands, a day. Pinney says one of her goals of the lab over the next five years is to help establish this emerging field of "high-throughput biochemistry and biophysics."
Understanding sequence-function relationships of enzymes could revolutionize how doctors treat diseases, including cancer. In the lab, Pinney and her teammates are using their research to help understand drug resistance and disease treatment. In the future, this might make it easier to develop antivirals more quickly, for example.
"Right now, people are mostly doing one drug for one virus, so we're thinking about how to make a drug that works across many viruses," Pinney says. "Then the next time we have a pandemic, we have something on the shelf we can optimize. It's all about sequence variation, both in resistance and across different viruses."
Pinney sees artificial intelligence as another important frontier in her field. But rather than using existing AI to help in her research, she sees her lab contributing to the building of new AI systems all together. AI is only useful if it has been fed useful data, Pinney says. Right now, they need to collect more data.
"I think there needs to be a shift from investment in AI proper to investment in experiments," Pinney says. "What's happening on a computer is no longer the rate-limiting step. What's happening in the lab is the rate-limiting step."