Chris was born in Chapel Hill, beginning an exciting and borderline unhealthy lifelong obsession with UNC basketball. After he realized he wasn’t athletic enough to play in the NBA, he attended William and Mary as an undergraduate, where he worked under Dr. Doug Young to use unnatural amino acid technology to develop and optimize novel bioconjugation reactions. For his research, he was recognized as a 2017 Beckman Scholar as well as a 2018 Goldwater Scholar. 

After graduating a semester early, Chris spent six months at GSK as a medicinal chemistry co-op, working as part of a lead optimization team for a program in the pre-clinical stage. There, he designed, synthesized, and biochemically evaluated small molecule inhibitors for a target protein.

 Returning to his roots and his beloved Tar Heels, he came back to Chapel Hill in 2019 to pursue a PhD in chemistry. In the Waters Lab, he utilizes chemical biology and structural biology techniques to probe reader proteins and develop novel chemical tools to solve biological problems. 

When he’s not in lab or at the Smith Center, Chris is usually at a restaurant or planning his next culinary adventure.