David Baker received a BA in Biology from Harvard University and a PhD in Biochemistry from the University of California, Berkeley. Currently, Baker is the Head of the Institute for Protein Design and a Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Washington, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. His research utilizes both experimental and computational methods to study the design of protein structures, and the mechanisms of protein folding, protein-protein and protein-small molecule interactions.
Baker’s lab developed the crowd-sourced protein folding design programs Rosetta@home (http://boinc.bakerlab.org/) and Foldit (http://fold.it/portal/). Baker has won numerous awards for his work including the Raymond and Beverly Sackler International Prize in Biophysics in 2008. Baker is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Sciences.
