Christian B. Macdonald, Ph.D.
Evolutionary biophysicist
Christian Macdonald, Ph.D.
he/him/his
Scientist II
christian.macdonald (at) wisc.edu
I am currently a scientist in the Wayment-Steele lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Previously I was a member of the Fraser and Coyote-Maestas labs at UCSF, where I used high-throughput functional genomics and structural approaches to understand the biophysics of protein evolution in contexts including antibiotic resistance, membrane protein folding and biogenesis, and kinase signalling. My work was supported by a Kirschstein NRSA (F32) fellowship from NIH/NIGMS.
I graduated from Arizona State University with degrees in Mathematics and Biochemistry, where I conducted research in the total synthesis of marine natural products with Dr. George Pettit. Afterwards, I attended the University of Michigan for my Ph.D. in Biophysics. In the Stockbridge lab, I studied the evolution and function of bacterial membrane proteins involved in xenobiotic resistance, whether as fluoride channels or efflux transporters.
Outside of lab, I enjoy books, music, being outdoors and/or on a bike, and drinking perfectly normal amounts of coffee.
news
| May 10, 2026 | It’s been a little while, and a few things have happened. I’m now a scientist in the Wayment-Steele lab at UW-Madison! I’m having a lot of fun setting up some exciting stuff and look forward to showing some of it before long. There have been a few publications. Matt’s work on proton-sensing GPCRs is out in Cell, and both of Gabby’s MET kinase studies landed in eLife — the conserved regulatory motifs paper and its inhibitor-resistance mapping followup. A couple DMS tools have been published, too: Jingyou’s Rosace-AA in Bioinformatics Advances, Jerome’s Lilace in Genome Biology. There are also Pooja’s fragment screening against VatD in Structure, and a review of high-throughput mutational screens for membrane transporters with Silas and the Raman lab in Cell Chemical Biology. A preprint about a suite of codon foundation models using our DMS data in collaboration with the Goodarzi lab is up, as well as Donovan’s deep mutational scan of EccD3 in the mycobacterial ESX secretion system. |
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| Jul 19, 2024 | Gabby’s followup preprint performing inhibitor screens against MET kinase libraries is now on biorXiv. Priyanka and I also published a review of an interesting recent preprint by Vincoff et al. which fine-tuned ESM-2 on fusion oncoproteins. Read it on PREreview: https://prereview.org/reviews/12658078 Finally, I just joined the organizing committee of the Atlas of Variant Effects seminar series. |
| May 24, 2024 | We had a few papers published recently: our paper on the drug transporter OCT1 was published in Molecular Cell, and our Rosace paper was just published in Genome Biology. Also, Matt’s preprint on a proton-sensing GPCR is up on bioRxiv, as well as Gabby’s preprint on MET kinase fusions and activating mutations. |
| Nov 11, 2023 | I was awarded an F32 through NIGMS for my proposal “Connecting structure and fitness landscapes to overcome antibiotic resistance.” |
| Aug 25, 2023 | I received a Mary Anne Koda-Kimble Seed Award for Innovation to support my efforts for massively combinatorial library generation for transformative pharmacogenomics, with an exciting acronym: SHRIMPLE. |
latest posts
| Jun 06, 2024 | Chain renaming in PyMOL |
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| Jun 04, 2024 | De-spaghettification |
| May 30, 2024 | PyMOL mapping notes |