Spencer Guo


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 the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program and the Eckhardt Graduate Scholarship.

Update (Feb. 2024)! Our paper on the dynamics of a voltage-sensing protein is published at Nature Communications.

Update (Feb. 2024)! Our paper on the incorporating memory for computing kinetic statistics is published at J. Chem. Phys..


About

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 (proteins) jiggle around (dynamics) and try to learn interesting things (mechanisms) from the seemingly random movement. You can read more about this below or in my blog (where I also discuss general scientific topics I find interesting).

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!


Contact

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.


Research

Motivation

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.

Areas

Publications

A full listing can be found on Google Scholar.

Accurate estimates of dynamical statistics with memory, J. Chem. Phys. [Editor's pick]
Chatipat Lorpaiboon, Spencer Guo, John Strahan, Aaron Dinner, Jonathan Weare. (arXiv, code)
Dynamics of activation in the voltage-sensing domain of Ciona intestinalis phosphatase Ci-VSP, Nature Comunications
Spencer Guo, Rong Shen, Benoît Roux, Aaron Dinner. (biorXiv, code)
Inexact iterative numerical linear algebra for neural network-based spectral estimation and rare-event prediction, J. Chem. Phys.
John Strahan, Spencer Guo, Chatipat Lorpaiboon, Aaron Dinner, Jonathan Weare. (arXiv, code)


Writing

Food

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.

Miscellaneous

Update (Dec. 2023)! Some of my favorite things from 2023. (You can find previous years' lists here and here.)


Media

Two of my performances with the Stanford Collaborative Orchestra:

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Last updated March 1, 2024.