Jon Lai is the Dan Danciger Professor of Biochemistry at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, in the Bronx NY. He was born and raised in Canada and received his B. Sc. (Hons.) in Biochemistry from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario in 1999. He then obtained his Ph. D. in Biophysics in 2004, under the mentorship of Prof. Samuel Gellman at the University of Wisconsin - Madison where studied the structure and function of peptide oligomers. He was Helen Hay Whitney postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School in Biological Chemistry from 2004-2007, where he studied large enzymatic assemblies with Prof. Chris Walsh, and viral glycoprotein structure and function with Prof. Stephen Harrison. He began his independent lab at Einstein in 2007 as an Assistant Professor and rose through the ranks to full professor in 2018. His group has long-standing research interests in structure-based design of novel antibody therapeutics, isolation and characterization of antibodies, and vaccine design. He has published over 85 peer-reviewed manuscripts. He is recipient of a number of awards including the Beckman Young Investigator Award, the Irma T. Hirschl/Monique Weill-Caulier Career Scientist Award, and the XSeed Award by Deerfield.