Margaux Pinney

Title: 
Assistant Professor of Chemistry
Department: 
Chemistry
Bio/CV: 
  • B.S. Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of Washington (2014)
  • M.S. Medicine, Stanford University (2014–2018)
  • Ph.D. Biochemistry, Stanford University (2014-2021)
  • Postdoctoral Scholar, Stanford University (2021-2022)
  • Sandler Fellow, Principal Investigator, University of California, San Francisco (2022–2025)
  • NIH Early Independence Award (2022)
  • Assistant Professor, University of California, Berkeley (starting July 2025)
Research: 

Research areas: Chemical biology, High-throughput biochemistry; Microfluidics; Evolutionary biochemistry; Enzyme functional prediction, engineering, and design.

Proteins are crucial to cellular function: enzymes catalyze reactions, molecular switches regulate signaling, and membrane proteins link cells to their environment. Traditional biochemistry, while invaluable, has limited throughput and often studies only a few protein variants and properties. In vivo methods like deep mutational scanning are high-throughput but convoluted, making it difficult to isolate the effects of mutations on specific biochemical properties. The Pinney Lab addresses this by developing high-throughput, microfluidic-based methods to measure key biochemical constants for thousands of protein variants in a single experiment. We use these methods to study protein function, evolution, disease-causing and drug resistance mutations, and to advance enzyme design. By combining our high-throughput biochemical data with machine and deep learning, we aim to predict biochemical properties directly from protein sequence.