# David Baker American biochemist, Professor at the University of Washington, and founding director of the **Institute for Protein Design** (IPD). Best known for pioneering **de novo protein design** — engineering proteins with entirely new structures and functions from scratch, rather than modifying natural ones. Also led the long-running Rosetta / RoseTTAFold software effort that has been a parallel track to [[AlphaFold]] on the structure-prediction side. Shared the **2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry**: one half to David Baker for computational protein design, and the other half jointly to [[Demis Hassabis]] and [[John Jumper]] for AlphaFold's protein structure prediction. ## Why he matters - De novo designed proteins are now used in vaccines (e.g., a COVID-19 candidate), enzymes, biosensors, and therapeutics; the field he built is one of the most consequential biotech platforms of the 2020s - Complements the AlphaFold story: structure prediction (AlphaFold) and structure design (Baker lab) are the two halves of computational protein biology - Long-running advocate for open-source scientific software (Rosetta, RoseTTAFold) and training; runs one of the most prolific computational biology groups in the world ## Quotes <!-- QueryToSerialize: LIST FROM #type/quote AND [[David Baker]] WHERE public_note = true SORT file.name ASC --> ## Books <!-- QueryToSerialize: LIST FROM #type/book AND [[David Baker]] WHERE public_note = true SORT file.name ASC --> ## References - Baker Lab: https://www.bakerlab.org/ - Institute for Protein Design: https://www.ipd.uw.edu/ - Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Baker_(biochemist) - Nobel Prize 2024 (Chemistry): https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/chemistry/2024/ ## Related - [[AlphaFold]] - [[Demis Hassabis]] - [[John Jumper]] - [[Google DeepMind]] - [[Artificial Intelligence (AI)]]