Christopher Obara is an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Pharmacology and Chemistry & Biochemistry here at UC San Diego, where he leads a laboratory focused on understanding how individual proteins, governed by the laws of physics, collectively give rise to complex, self-maintaining cellular systems. He received his bachelor’s degrees in physics and entomology at the University of Florida, where he worked on several diverse problems including hive mind theory in ants and termites, symbiotic viruses in wasps, and quantum tunneling in solar panels. He married his diverse interests in physics and biology during his Ph.D. at the NIH under the guidance of Ted Pierson, where he studied how vaccines and other immune responses affect virus infection using approaches from classical statistical physics. In this work, he often felt frustrated by his inability to observe the single biological events that gave rise to these large-scale biological effects like virus-induced disease. This led him to pursue an IARF fellowship to join the research group of Jennifer Lippincott-Schwartz as a postdoctoral fellow, initially at NICHD and eventually at HHMI Janelia Research Campus. His postdoctoral work was broadly focused on the development and application of advanced imaging approaches to characterize the biophysical processes that give rise to living systems, with a particular focus on the endoplasmic reticulum.

Combining the diverse, multidisciplinary skillsets from his training, his lab at UCSD is well equipped to take on the challenge of performing true quantitative cell biology at the molecular scale. They combine highly specialized tools to make fundamental discoveries: custom engineering of systems for conventional light, superresolution, or electron microscopy; correlative pipelines for electron microscopy and cryoelectron microscopy; many-color flow cytometry and probe/sensor design. This potent combination, when used with computational modeling and classic techniques in cell biology and biochemistry, allows them to study the molecular machines that drive living systems directly in the dynamic, nanoscale environment where they naturally execute their functions.