David Baker (biochemist) facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
David Baker
|
|
|---|---|
Baker in 2013
|
|
| Born | October 6, 1962 |
| Alma mater | |
| Known for |
|
| Spouse(s) | Hannele Ruohola-Baker |
| Awards |
|
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Computational biology |
| Institutions | |
| Doctoral advisor | Randy Schekman |
| Other academic advisors | David Agard |
| Doctoral students | Richard Bonneau |
| Other notable students | Brian Kuhlman, Tanja Kortemme |
David Baker (born October 6, 1962, in Seattle, Washington) is an American biochemist, computational biologist who has pioneered methods to design proteins and predict their three-dimensional structures. He is the Henrietta and Aubrey Davis Endowed Professor in Biochemistry, an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and an adjunct professor of genome sciences, bioengineering, chemical engineering, computer science, and physics at the University of Washington. He was awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for protein design using RossetaFold.
Artificial intelligence programs developed by Baker and others have now largely solved the problem of protein structure prediction. Baker is a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences and the director of the University of Washington's Institute for Protein Design. He has co-founded more than a dozen biotechnology companies and was included in Time magazine's inaugural list of the 100 Most Influential People in health in 2024.
Contents
Life
Baker was born in Seattle, Washington on October 6, 1962. He earned his undergraduate degree from Harvard University in 1984. He completed his doctorate in biochemistry at the University of California, Berkeley in 1989 in the laboratory of Randy Schekman, where he worked predominantly on protein transport and trafficking in yeast. In 1993, he completed his postdoctoral training in biophysics with David Agard at the University of California, San Francisco.
Baker joined the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Washington School of Medicine as faculty in 1993. He became a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator in 2000. Baker was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009. He is married to Hannele Ruohola-Baker, another biochemist at UW. They have two children.
Research
Although primarily known for the development of computational methods for predicting and designing the structures and functions of proteins, Baker maintains an active experimental biochemistry group. He has authored over 600 scientific papers.
Baker's group developed the Rosetta algorithm for ab initio protein structure prediction, which has been extended into a tool for protein design, a distributed computing project called Rosetta@Home, and the computer game Foldit. Baker served as the director of the Rosetta Commons, a consortium of labs and researchers that develop biomolecular structure prediction and design software. Baker's group has regularly competed in the CASP structure prediction competition, specializing in ab initio methods, including both manually assisted and automated variants of the Rosetta protocol.
Baker's group is also active in the field of protein design; they are noted for designing Top7, the first artificial protein with a novel fold.
Baker has co-founded several biotechnology companies, including Prospect Genomics which was acquired by an Eli Lilly subsidiary in 2001, Icosavax which was acquired by AstraZeneca in 2023, Sana Biotechnology, Lyell Immunotherapeutics, and Xaira Therapeutics.
Awards
For his work on protein folding, Baker has received numerous awards, including the Overton Prize (2002), the Sackler International Prize in Biophysics (2008),
the Wiley Prize (2022) and the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the category "Biology and Biomedicine" (2022)
For his work on protein design, Baker has received the Newcomb Cleveland Prize (2004),
the Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology (2004), and the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences (2021).
In 2024, Baker was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry.
Appearances
In April 2019, Baker gave a TED talk titled "5 challenges we could solve by designing new proteins" at TED2019 in Vancouver, Canada.
