He was first introduced to structural biology as an UCLA undergraduate working with Fred Eiserling on the genetic regulation of bacteriophage T4 tail length. Jerry earned his PhD under Michael Levitt at Stanford University in the Biophysics Program working on computational studies involving data mining molecular dynamics simulations. He continued as a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Washington with David Baker developing protein structure prediction methods. His current work focuses on developing an amino acid code for protein structure based on the simple 4 residue knob-socket motif.