Professor, UCSD and
President/Director, JCB

Metro Region: San Diego

Member Since: 2018

Senyon Teddy Choe is a synthetic biologist. He served as the president of Mogam Institute for Biomedical Research (MIBR) in Korea since 2015, a professor of Biology at UCSD since 1993, and Curevo’s founding SAB member in 2017. His research career has focused on structural understanding of mechanisms of TGF-beta family signaling and of potassium channels. An extension of these works explored designing novel synthetic biologics to modulate stem cells and sick cells directly.

Teddy received his Biophysics degree from University of California, Berkeley in 1987, and the postdoctoral training in the department of Physics at Cornell University. He determined atomic crystal structures of diphtheria toxin and of synthetic coiled-coil zipper peptides at UCLA. He was a founding faculty member of the structural biology laboratory at the renowned Salk Institute, San Diego, in 1993. During his faculty tenure at Salk Institute (1993-2015), his new research team focused to elucidate molecular mechanisms of how cells communicate. Drs. Francis Crick, Wylie Vale, Tony Hunter, Chuck Stevens, and Juan Carlos Ispizua Belmonte have been his major mentors and collaborating colleagues at Salk Institute.

His major honors include election in 1999 to the Fellow of American Association for the Advancement of Science in recognition for his frontier science in biophysics. In 2008, he founded joint Center for Biosciences in Korea to carry out protein engineering and developing new stem cell therapy, facilitating the drug discovery for pharmaceutical industry. His current research focuses on synthetic protein biologics against bone disorders and fibrosis. He is a sought-after speaker at public events including his recent TEDx lectures.