David Baker is the director of the Institute of Protein Design at the University of Washington and a cofounder of 17 companies based on his work in protein design. - Credit: 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.
About the Seminars
The NERSC@50 seminar series features past and current users presenting 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.
Our goal is to design a new generation of proteins that address current-day problems not faced during evolution.
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. Videos of past seminars are posted on the NERSC YouTube and Vimeo channels.
About NERSC and Berkeley Lab
The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) is the mission computing facility for the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science, the nation’s single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences.
Located at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), NERSC serves 11,000 scientists at national laboratories and universities researching a wide range of problems in climate, fusion energy, materials sciences, physics, chemistry, computational biology, and other disciplines. An average of 2,000 peer-reviewed science results a year rely on NERSC resources and expertise, which has also supported the work of seven Nobel Prize-winning scientists and teams.
NERSC is a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility.
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