Jeffrey Varner holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Chemistry as well as a Master’s and a Ph.D. degree in Chemical Engineering from Purdue University. Professor Varner’s graduate thesis work at Purdue was done under the direction of Professor D. Ramkrishna in the area of modeling and analysis of metabolic networks.
Following Purdue, Professor Varner was a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Biology at the ETH-Zurich, where he studied signal transduction mechanisms involved in cell death under Professor Jay Bailey. After the ETH, Professor Varner was a scientist in the oncology business unit of Genencor International, Inc,, in Palo Alto, CA. While at Genencor, he was involved in the discovery of novel targets in human cancers and was a project team member for preclinical, Phase I, and Phase II studies of protein therapeutics for the treatment of colorectal cancer and chronic lymphocytic leukemia.
Professor Varner left Genencor at the end of 2005 to join the faculty of the Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Department at Cornell University. At Cornell, the Varner Lab is developing physiochemical modeling tools to rationally reprogram human signal transduction architectures.