James Apgar, Ph.D.

Associate Research Fellow at Pfizer

James Apgar is an Associate Research Fellow in the Biomedicine Design group at Pfizer Inc., working in computational structural modeling and design.

James obtained his BA in Chemistry from Williams College in 2001, and a PhD in physical chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2008. At M.I.T. he worked in the lab of Prof. Amy Keating with a focus on computational protein design and biophysics.

After graduate school, James worked for 2 years as a Post Doc and Senior Scientist at Agrivida, Inc., an agricultural biotech and biofuels company, in the area of computational design of glycoside hydrolases and intein-switches.

In 2011, James joined Pfizer with a focus on computational design and optimization of antibody and protein therapeutics.  His work here has focused on development and implementation of in silico design methods to improve the biophysical and developability properties of antibodies, leading to the discovery and development of better-behaved therapeutics with reduced cycle times.