Jeff Weber, PhD

Jeff Weber is a Research Staff Member at IBM.

Jeff was previously a postdoctoral fellow in IBM’s Soft Matter Theory and Simulation group at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York. His research focused on using nonequilibrium simulation techniques to support the development of HIV and cancer vaccines and to understand the antibacterial properties of certain nanomaterials.

Jeff completed his PhD in chemistry at Stanford University. His research focused on the theoretical study of protein folding and conformational change, centered at the interface between applied biophysics and the physics of disordered and general nonequilibrium systems. In particular, Jeff’s interest in applying nonequilibrium statistical mechanics to master-equation based models of protein dynamics led him to probe glassy and driven dynamical processes in biomolecular systems. Intriguing connections between basic non-equilibrium principles and protein chaperonin function, amyloid-like misfolded protein states, and signaling protein activation emerged over the course of his graduate studies. Jeff’s thesis, “Far-From-Equilibrium Phenomena in Protein Dynamics” was awarded the Fannie and John Hertz Foundation 2015 Thesis Prize.

Jeff graduated from Willamette University in 2010 with a double major in chemistry and mathematics. As an undergraduate, Jeff received a two-year Goldwater Scholarship, and he conducted research on anti-cancer compounds in the form of drug-protein adducts. Jeff also spent a summer studying ultrafast dynamics in Ahmed Zewail’s group at Caltech, and he devoted the subsequent semester to investigating protein active sites with X-ray spectroscopy as a visiting researcher at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory.

Jeff is from Helena, Montana.