Members

Shawn earned a Bachelor’s degree from Montana State University with high honors in chemistry in 2005. He completed a PhD at Montana State University in 2010 studying [Fe-Fe] Hydrogenase active site biosynthesis with Dr. John Peters. In 2010 he moved to Caltech to join the group of Dr. Victoria Orphan and studied interspecies microbial consortia and was awarded the title of Agouron Scholar. He joined as an Associate Professor at the Tokyo Metropolitan University in 2014. In 2016, Shawn moved to ELSI where he has been since then. His interests span chemistry, enzymology, isotope fractionation and geochemistry, evolution, and microbial interactions and ecology.
Shawn was a NASA Early Career Fellow, a CIRES Visiting Fellow at CU Boulder in 2024 and has authored more than 80 peer reviewed papers.