Hello and welcome! My name is Spencer Guo and I am a Ph.D. candidate in chemistry at the University of Chicago, where I am jointly advised by Aaron Dinner and Benoît Roux. I'm grateful to be supported by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program and the Eckhardt Graduate Scholarship.
Update (May 2024)! Our preprint on the temperature dependence of a fold-switching protein is up on bioRxiv.
Update (Feb. 2024)! Our paper on the dynamics of a voltage-sensing protein is published at Nature Communications.
My academic work lies broadly in theoretical and computational biophysics, primarily focused on understanding
proteins from a dynamical and mechanistic perspective.
In layman's terms, I use computers to watch how molecules in your body (
My curriculum vitae is available here.
Previously, I was in the Markland group investigating various methods of simulating infrared spectra for condensed-phase systems (mostly water). Before that, I worked in the Chen lab synthesizing optochemical probes for studying zebrafish development and at Genentech.
Besides science, I enjoy playing violin and piano. At Stanford, I was in the Stanford Collaborative Orchestra (SCOr) and the Stanford Symphony Orchestra. See below for some of my past performances!
If you'd like to get in touch, please send an email to scguo [at] uchicago.edu. For a more traditional synopsis of my professional experiences, you can check out my LinkedIn.
As a mentioned above, my research work tries to answer the general problem of understanding protein dynamics in all its forms, especially to elucidate mechanisms and compute kinetics. Of course, the real question is why do we care about protein dynamics and mechanisms at all? Broadly speaking, traditional methods of looking at proteins (such as x-ray crystallography) can only yield static snapshots. Yet we can't fully understand their activity from these snapshots, just as we can't ascertain the plot of a movie from stills alone. To answer questions about enzymes—proteins which speed up essential reactions in your body such as metabolism—we need to understand how the target molecule binds or unbinds to the protein and how its complex machinery activates to catalyze the reaction of interest, all of which is necessarily a dynamic process. On a more practical note, we hope that a deeper understanding of protein dynamics and mechanisms will allow us to more precisely design therapeutics that do what we want. For example, to design fast- or slow-acting therapeutic formulations of insulin, we need to know how insulin activates from its injected formulation on short and long time-scales.
A full listing can be found on Google Scholar.
I love all things food and cooking, whether it be American staples such as mashed potatoes, a classic French bœuf bourguignon, or Shanghainese specialities ranging from drunken hairy crab to shengjianbao. I'm a huge fan of The Food Lab, headed by the inimitable J. Kenji López-Alt, which I credit to giving me a knowledge of the scientific principles which underlie cooking.
I maintain an occasional food blog on this website! There I discuss anything which I find interesting and is tangentially related to food. This writing grew out of a previous effort to document my food experiences.
Update (Dec. 2023)! Some of my favorite things from 2023. (You can find previous years' lists here and here.)