Jennifer Maynard, an expert in antibody therapeutics, holds both the Z.D. Bonner Professorship and is the Claire and Peter Buenz Endowed Chair in Chemical Engineering. She joined The University of Texas at Austin in 2007 as assistant professor before being appointed to professor in 2018.
Maynard leads the CPRIT-funded Advanced Protein Therapeutics core which aims to help cancer researchers in Texas evaluate novel treatment approaches and the UT Austin/ MD Anderson TRIUMPH-IBC effort which aims to develop new treatments for inflammatory breast cancer. She also serves on the executive committee of UT Austin’s translational interdisciplinary research center Texas Biologics. It focuses on the discovery, early development and clinical translation of biologic therapies in multiple disease areas and aims to grow the therapeutics ecosystem at UT.
In 2016, the Food and Drug Administration approved an antibody engineered by Maynard, with fellow UT chemical engineering Professor George Georgiou and chemistry Professor Brent Iverson for the treatment of anthrax, which subsequently became part of the strategic national stockpile. She and her colleagues have also made important breakthroughs on other illnesses, including pertussis (whooping cough) and human cytomegalovirus.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Maynard was part of a UT Austin research team that engineered a hyper-stable version of the coronavirus spike protein called HexaPro. This variant has greatly increased manufacturability, induces high levels of protective antibodies when used as a vaccine in several clinical trials and is a widely used research tool. Her work in the development of protein therapeutics and vaccines to address unmet medical needs in infectious diseases led to her recognition as the inaugural UT Austin Emerging Inventor of the Year in 2015, an American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineers fellow in 2017 and election as a senior member of the National Academy of Inventors in 2023.
Maynard received her B.A., Human Biology, from Stanford University in 1996, and her Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from The University of Texas at Austin in 2002 before completing post-doctoral studies in Microbiology and Immunology at Stanford University.
Maynard succeeds David Allen, a world-renowned urban air quality and sustainable systems expert who led the department as interim chair in 2025-2026.
