Dr. David Baker

Dr. David Baker is a renowned biochemist and computational biologist. He is a Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Washington (UW), where he is the principal investigator of the Baker laboratory. He serves as the Director and Safety Officer of the Rosetta Commons, a consortium of labs and researchers that develop biomolecular structure prediction and design software. He is also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences.

Dr. Baker received his PH.D. in biochemistry at the University of California, Berkeley and completed his postdoctoral work in biophysics at University of California, San Francisco. A world-renowned expert on protein structure prediction and design, Dr. Baker is leading a team of researchers designing proteins with new structures and functions. Baker has also developed an online video game called Foldit which enlists the general public to design new protein structures.

Dr. Baker has received several awards in recognition of his work, including the AAAS Newcomb Cleveland Prize, the Sackler International Prize in Biophysics, the Overton Prize from the International Society of Computational Biology, and the Feynman Prize from the Foresight Institute. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Sciences. He has also been listed amongst Thomas Reuters’ list of “World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds” for 2015.