Andrew Buller

Andrew grew up in Coralville, Iowa and enjoyed spending his summers swimming, hiking, and horsing around at YMCA Camp Wapsie. He attended college at the University of Iowa, where he doubled major in Mathematics and Biochemistry and did research with Drs. Hatem El-Shanti and Alex Bassuk in the Department of Pediatrics. Andrew moved to Baltimore for graduate school in the Program in Molecular Biophysics at The Johns Hopkins University. There, Andrew worked in the lab of Prof. Craig Townsend learning bioorganic chemistry and, in collaboration with Prof. Joel Schildbach, X-ray crystallography. The desire to learn how to employ enzymes as practical biocatalysts motivated his postdoctoral work in Prof. Frances Arnold’s lab at Caltech, where Andrew led a team of scientists to engineer the premier biocatalysts for the production of tryptophan analogs from simple precursors. In the summer of 2017, after 3.5 years working on enzyme directed evolution, Andrew joined the Department of Chemistry at UW-Madison as an Assistant Professor. When not at work Andrew enjoys spending time with his family, reading, going for a run, and playing table top games.