Mateusz Jaskolowski, PhD.

I grew up in Poland and studied biotechnology at the Intercollegiate Faculty of Biotechnology, jointly run by the University of Gdańsk and the Medical University of Gdańsk. That is where I first encountered proteins as objects you could study, build, and redesign. The interest stuck.

The Kossiakoff lab at the University of Chicago was where I first worked full-time in research, completing the practical part of my MSc as a research assistant. I spent just over a year raising synthetic Fabs against the Ebola virus nucleoprotein by phage display and solving crystal structures of the resulting complexes. The work produced a US patent and my first publications.

During nine years at ETH Zürich in Nenad Ban's group, I worked first as a PhD student and then as a postdoc, mostly at the cryo-electron microscope. The focus was the mitochondrial ribosome and its assembly, the human ribosome, and the cotranslational factors that act on each protein while it is still emerging from the exit tunnel.

Since October 2024 I have been at the University of Cambridge on an SNSF Postdoc Mobility Fellowship, split between Paul Miller's group (Pharmacology) and Pietro Sormanni's (Chemistry). By analysing large collections of nanobody sequences, I identify patterns associated with stability and developability, then build and use a sequence-level model to design a set of three next-generation synthetic nanobody libraries for phage-display discovery.

I want to connect library design, experimental discovery, and structural biology more tightly, so that a useful binder becomes not just a hit, but a tool for understanding how a protein works.

I read fantasy and science fiction, cycle, and train at the gym. I am also slowly writing a fantasy novel. In fiction, the experiments always work.