Alief is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Lehner group, working on allosteric transcription factors in bacteria
Alief obtained their BA in Mathematics and Biology from Carleton College, MN. There, with Prof. Rika Anderson, he used metagenomic data to study the evolution of sulfur-oxidizing bacteria in deep-sea hydrothermal vents. He then pursued a PhD in the Organismic and Evolutionary Biology program at Harvard, where they worked on viral–host protein co-evolution with Prof. Michael Desai. In particular, they built and measured large protein variant libraries to explore higher-order interactions between mutations.
Alief then moved to the Wellcome Sanger Institute, joining Prof. Ben Lehner’s group as a postdoctoral fellow. He hopes to develop high-throughput methods to measure diverse protein phenotypes. Their current work focuses on allosteric transcription factors, investigating how allostery is encoded in sequence and how it evolves.