James S. Fraser

James S. Fraser is a Professor at the University of California San Francisco whose research focuses on understanding protein structure, dynamics, and evolution, with strong applications in drug discovery and molecular medicine. His lab integrates biophysics, structural biology, and computational approaches to study how proteins function, evolve, and interact with small molecules. A major emphasis of his work is fragment-based drug discovery and X-ray crystallography, including large-scale fragment screening efforts that aim to identify novel therapeutic leads against challenging targets such as viral enzymes and antibiotic resistance factors. His research also explores how protein conformational heterogeneity and allosteric regulation influence biological activity, combining experimental data with advanced computational modeling. Through interdisciplinary collaborations, his group has contributed to drug discovery efforts targeting pathogens such as SARS-CoV-2 and has helped develop community-wide benchmarking challenges to improve computational methods in chemistry and biology. His work appears in leading journals including Cell, Science Advances, eLife, ACS Central Science, and Structure.