Sam is a Californian through and through. He grew up in San Diego, CA and moved to the central coast for college. He received a B.S. in Chemistry from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo in 2012 where he did undergraduate research combining metallo-biomimetics and polymer chemistry. Inspired by his undergraduate research experience, he went to graduate school at UC Irvine where he worked with Andy Borovik and received his Ph.D. in Chemistry in 2017. During his Ph.D. he developed artificial Cu proteins using biotin-streptavidin, leveraging synthetic inorganic chemistry and protein engineering to understand natural Cu proteins. Sam then moved up the coast to UC San Francisco where he was an NIH Postdoctoral Fellow with Bill DeGrado. There, he learned de novo protein design and acquired the expertise to apply these tools to bioinorganic chemistry. In January 2024, Sam began his independent career at UC Riverside as an assistant professor in the Chemistry department. His lab is focused on applying (bio)inorganic principles to protein design to build structure-function relationships of metalloenzymes.