Kester Coutinho

Kester Coutinho is a technical advisor in the intellectual property group. Prior to joining Ropes & Gray, Kester received his PhD in Biochemistry, Cellular and Molecular Biology from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

For his doctoral research, Kester spearheaded a moonshot aimed at the precision-engineering of a new generation of immune-like cell-based therapies using synthetic biology and protein engineering approaches. During the course of this work, Kester combined high-parameter and imaging flow cytometry tools with machine learning algorithms to develop a single-cell structure-function atlas of heterogeneous mergers and acquisitions occurring between immune predator cells and cancer prey cells. Owing to his undergraduate training, which included research experiences at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Harvard Medical School, Kester’s technical portfolio includes biophysics, biomechanics, electron microscopy, computational modeling, autoimmunity, and preclinical trials.