David Baker, born on October 6, 1962, in Seattle, Washington, is an American biochemist and computational biologist renowned for pioneering methods in protein design and structure prediction. He is currently the Henrietta and Aubrey Davis Endowed Professor in Biochemistry at the University of Washington and an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
Baker is also the director of the University of Washington’s Institute for Protein Design and has co-founded over a dozen biotechnology companies. His work has greatly advanced the field of protein folding, particularly through the development of the software Rosetta, and in 2024, he was awarded half of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his contributions to computational protein design.
Educational Background
David Baker graduated with a Bachelor of Science from Harvard University in 1984. He pursued his doctoral studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where he completed his PhD in biochemistry in 1989 under the supervision of Nobel laureate Randy Schekman. His doctoral research focused on protein transport and trafficking in yeast. After his PhD, he conducted postdoctoral work in biophysics with David Agard at the University of California, San Francisco.
Career
Baker began his career in academia in 1993 when he joined the University of Washington’s Department of Biochemistry. His work focuses on computational biology, particularly predicting and designing protein structures. His lab developed Rosetta, a software that revolutionized the understanding of protein folding and design.
Baker has been a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator since 2000 and has been instrumental in launching initiatives such as Rosetta@Home and Fold.it, which leverage crowd-sourced efforts and computational power to improve protein design research. He has received numerous awards, including the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences (2021), Wiley Prize (2022), and the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Controversies
David Baker’s career has not been marked by significant controversies, although the competitive nature of the field of protein folding, especially in relation to the developments of AI models like AlphaFold, has stirred some academic rivalry. His collaborations and contributions have largely been recognized as groundbreaking and pivotal in scientific advancement.
David Baker Social Media Handle
https://www.instagram.com/bakerblades/?hl=en
Personal Life
David Baker is married to Hannele Ruohola-Baker, who is also a biochemist at the University of Washington. The couple has two children. Baker grew up in a Jewish family in Seattle, with his parents, Marshall Baker, a physicist, and Marcia Bourgin Baker, a geophysicist. Outside of his academic pursuits, Baker enjoys outdoor activities and can often be seen hiking in the mountains of Washington.
David Baker Net Worth
David Baker’s estimated net worth is around $1 Million.