NERSCPowering Scientific Discovery for 50 Years

David Baker Talks Protein Design on June 3

June 2, 2024

By Elizabeth Ball
Contact: cscomms@lbl.gov

david baker v2

David Baker directs the Institute for Protein Design at the University of Washington.

On June 3 at 1:30 p.m. PDT, the NERSC@50 seminar series welcomes David Baker of the Institute for Protein Design at the University of Washington. Join us for his presentation on prediction and design of protein interactions and how he’s using NERSC resources in his work to solve some of humanity's pressing problems.

The NERSC@50 seminar series features users both past and current presenting on exciting and important research enabled by NERSC systems.

Baker is the director of the Institute for Protein Design, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, a professor of biochemistry, and an adjunct professor of genome sciences, bioengineering, chemical engineering, computer science, and physics at the University of Washington. His research group is focused on the design of macromolecular structures and functions. He has published more than 600 research papers, been granted more than 100 patents, and cofounded 17 companies. Over 70 of his mentees have gone on to independent faculty positions.

Baker received his PhD in biochemistry with Randy Schekman at UC Berkeley and did postdoctoral work in biophysics with David Agard at UCSF. He is a recipient of the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences and a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Of his seminar talk, he said, “Proteins mediate the critical processes of life and beautifully solve the challenges faced during the evolution of modern organisms. Our goal is to design a new generation of proteins that address current-day problems not faced during evolution. In contrast to traditional protein engineering efforts, which have focused on modifying naturally occurring proteins, we design new proteins from scratch to optimally solve the problem at hand. I will describe these studies and also the proteome-level prediction of protein interactions, and the key contributions NERSC has made to both efforts.”

NERSC@50 seminars are held remotely on Zoom and open to Berkeley Lab staff, NERSC users, and the public. 


About NERSC and Berkeley Lab
The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) is a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility that serves as the primary high performance computing center for scientific research sponsored by the Office of Science. Located at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, NERSC serves almost 10,000 scientists at national laboratories and universities researching a wide range of problems in climate, fusion energy, materials science, physics, chemistry, computational biology, and other disciplines. Berkeley Lab is a DOE national laboratory located in Berkeley, California. It conducts unclassified scientific research and is managed by the University of California for the U.S. Department of Energy. »Learn more about computing sciences at Berkeley Lab.