About Us

Eric Graban is founder and CEO of Quarry Bio LLC. Eric brings over 20 years of experience in pharmaceutical and specialty chemicals research and manufacturing, including Small-Molecule Scale Up and Manufacturing at Eli Lilly & Company, and Technical and Operations Management for Biologics and Small-Molecule Fill-Finish Operations at Baxter Pharmaceutical Solutions. While working in Pharma, he led diverse and cross-functional teams of scientists and engineers, both in early and late stages of drug development and in commercialization. He identified gaps in the existing technologies for protein structure and binding measurements, which enabled him to develop unique insights into the needs of early-stage biologic and drug discovery and development. Eric received his Sc.B. in Biology from Brown University and his M.S. in Organic Chemistry from Ohio University.

Diego Zorio has proven to be a forward-thinking leader in the molecular, biochemistry and genomic fields. As a graduate student, at Indiana University in Bloomington, he made pivotal contributions to the splicing field, that were documented among others, in two publications in the prestigious journal Nature. As a postdoctoral fellow in University of Colorado Health Sciences Center (UCHSC) he was awarded the prestigious Damon Runyon Fellowship to study different aspects in the emerging field of co-transcriptional processing. At the end of his postdoctoral training, he was promoted to a faculty position as an Instructor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics (UCHSCS). In June of 2005, he was hired on a national search to head the Functional Genomics program at Taxolog, Inc. a world leader company in synthesis of taxanes. There he identified a genetic signature associated with taxane treatment in several types of cancer cell lines. In 2009 he was hired at Florida State University as an Associate Scholar Scientist in the Chemistry and Biochemistry department where he established several fruitful inter and intra-disciplinary collaborations with professors in the Chemistry and Biochemistry department as well as the Biology Department and Biomedical Sciences Department in the College of Medicine. From such collaboration he was hired in 2015 as a Research Faculty I in the Department of Biomedical Sciences- College of Medicine at FSU to apply his expertise in studying neuronal plasticity in the Auditory System during brain development, more specifically investigating the role of the Fragil-X mental retardation protein (FMRP) during this process. During his time at the College of Medicine, he was quickly promoted to Research Faculty II and was awarded a grant from AMGEN to study the role of FMRP in brain development. In 2022 he was hired as a Staff Scientist in the Biological Sciences Department to work the biology core laboratory to assist and advise other members of the department as well as other departments at FSU and FAMU, on how to generate their research goals and results more effectively and efficiently.

Carl Whittington is originally from Jacksonville, FL. There he obtained his B.S. in Biology from the University of North Florida. He moved to Florida State University to work on comparative biochemistry of Antarctic fish proteins and received his Ph.D. in Biological Science in 2011. During his doctoral studies he participated in the NSF Antarctic Biology Training Course at McMurdo Station, Antarctica. His postdoctoral training was in protein biophysics and enzymology followed by training in protein evolution. Since 2019, he has been Specialized Faculty at FSU where he runs the Analytical Lab in Biological Science and pursues research with collaborators in Biology and Biochemistry. His research interests focus on Evolutionary Biochemistry where he determines how proteins work the way they do (protein structure and function) and the mechanisms underlying how they got there (protein evolution). Carl has published experimental and computational studies on a wide range of proteins from bacteriophage coat proteins to human enzymes that regulate glucose homeostasis. A list of his publications can be found here. Carl has 17 years of experience in protein purification, and he advises us on our protein purification strategies.