David Baker
Dr. David Baker received his Ph.D. from University of California Berkeley in biochemistry under the supervision of Randy Schekman. He continued into his postdoctoral study in biophysics with David Agard at the University of California San Francisco. He is now the director of the Institute for Protein Design and the Henrietta and Aubrey Davis Endowed Professor in Biochemistry at the University of Washington. He is a member of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and holds several adjunct positions in genome mining, physics, chemical engineering, computer science, and bioengineering at UW. His contributions to the understanding of the fundamental principles of protein structure and function has given the world a new outlook on nature’s proteins. He and his group have pioneered the development of the Rosetta algorithm. His work seeks to understand protein folding to aid in the de novo computational design of macromolecules with distinguishing structure and function. Nature’s proteins have a limited and particular sequence space. Professor Baker has dedicated his work on expanding and exploiting that space.