Iris Young Email & Phone Number

Iris enjoys working at the interface of structural biology and scientific computing, primarily developing software expanding the capabilities of cutting-edge instrumentation for X-ray diffraction and electron microscopy. He earned his Ph.D. in chemistry from UC Berkeley working with Drs. Junko Yano, Vittal Yachandra and Nick Sauter at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory on discovery of the mechanism of water splitting in oxygenic photosynthesis using X-ray free electron laser (XFEL) diffraction. He worked with the Sauter group to develop XFEL diffraction data processing methods, including the cctbx.xfel program for real-time feedback at XFEL experiments, and with the Yano/Yachandra group to solve several of the first high-resolution room temperature structures and the first high-resolution transient state structures of photosystem II, revealing the sequence of changes at the heterometallic cluster that catalyzes oxygen evolution. As a postdoc with the Fraser group, he became an expert practitioner of cryoEM. He investigated the possibility of recovery of particle conformational and compositional heterogeneity through single particle reconstruction and developed software for identification of post-transcriptional modifications in cryoEM and crystallography maps. Iris currently works as a project scientist in the Sauter group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory on the (exa)scale computing for X-ray (f)ree (e)lectron (l)aser diffraction experiments (ExaFEL) project, bringing XFEL crystallography data processing tools to the exascale regime. As the world’s five instruments capable of these experiments undergo upgrades to enable kHz or MHz image acquisition rates, we are preparing to be able to process these datasets in real time and provide the feedback necessary to drive these experiments.

Listed skills include Python, Latex, Cryoem, Software Development, and 10 others.