Richard's path to co-founding Abalone Bio started at UC Berkeley in Physics, Biophysics, and Computer Science, and wound its way through early efforts at protein secondary structure prediction with Teresa Head-Gordon at UC Berkeley/LBNL, then to protein engineering and structural biology with Axel Brunger at Yale. After receiving his PhD in 2000, he was a member of one of the first systems and synthetic biology interdisciplinary efforts with Roger Brent and Sydney Brenner at the Molecular Sciences Institute, where he met co-founder Gustavo Pesce. Abalone Bio grew out of an "a-ha!" moment that produced a hybrid synthetic biology/computational antibody discovery and creation technology that uniquely draws on their genetics, synthetic biology, quantitative systems biology, and computational experiences to meet a long-standing therapeutic need for safe and effective drugs for undrugged or poorly drugged targets.

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