Chris MacDonald is a co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer / Chief Operating Officer of Abrus Bio, a San Diego company building an AI-enabled, single-molecule protein sequencing platform. It reverse-translates proteins, including post-translational modifications, into DNA that standard sequencing instruments can read. AI-based design of protein binders and other molecules is one of the company's focus areas.

Before Abrus, Chris was Chief Scientific Officer of ChromaCode, where he led core technology and IP development and the team that won the XPRIZE Rapid COVID Testing Grand Prize. Earlier he built and led consumables engineering and cloud analytics teams at Illumina. He holds a PhD in bioengineering from UC San Diego, with doctoral research in computational neuroscience, and teaches occasionally in the same department. He is an inventor on granted US patents in protein-to-DNA recoding and in signal encoding and decoding methods for multiplexing clinical tests.

As an Application Advisor to XPRIZE Quantum Applications, Chris focuses on where quantum computing could provide value in chemistry, drug discovery, and new sensor and tool modalities, and on moving new science from the lab into products.