Hayden grew up on the east coast and was first exposed to biology research as a high school intern in a GPCR signaling lab at the NIH. He later earned a BS in Biology from UNC Chapel Hill, where he studied chromatin and aneuploidy in cancer cells. After graduation, he moved back to the NIH for a postbac working on kinetochore structure and meiotic spindle assembly in Xenopus egg extracts. He switched coasts for his PhD at UCSF to explore the regulation of nucleosome structural dynamics by nuclear architectural proteins. He then made a shorter move across the bay for his postdoc at Berkeley.

In the Pinney lab, Hayden is interested in how enzymes have evolved to function at different temperatures. He’s excited about extending previous work on Adenylate kinase (Adk) to focus on the role of protein dynamics in this process.

Outside of lab, you can find Hayden reading on BART, riding his bike around San Francisco or baking something too sweet for his own good.