Noah is a rising senior at Brown University majoring in chemical physics. At Brown, Noah works in Professor Brenda Rubenstein’s research group, where he employs replica exchange molecular dynamics simulations to investigate the mechanism behind the gout-preventing properties of Proteoglycan 4. As a UCLA Amgen Scholar, Noah works under Professor Kendall Houk in the department of Chemistry and Biochemistry. This summer, Noah and the Houk group are working in collaboration with Professor David Baker’s group at the University of Washington to design the first ever enzyme catalyst for tetrazine cycloaddition reactions, a class of bioorthogonal reactions whose utility in molecular imaging and other biomedical applications can benefit from an effective enzyme catalyst. Recently, the Baker group used their newly developed deep-learning based methods to design many protein scaffolds with cavities that could have the potential to become catalytic binding sites. Utilizing their designs as a starting point, Noah will employ rotamer interaction field docking to modify the cavities of these designs so that it can bind and stabilize the tetrazine cycloaddition reaction’s transition state, the structure of which he will obtain via density functional theory calculations. Then, he will use a Monte-Carlo-based sequence design protocol to modify the amino acid sequences around the catalytic cavities in order to ensure that the designs are not only enzymatically active, but also possess high folding stability. Noah would like to thank Dr. Kendall Houk and Declan Evans for their extensive mentorship, as well as the Amgen Foundation for supporting this research project.