David Baker

I'll be honest — before the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, most people outside of biochemistry circles had never heard of David Baker, and that's kind of wild given what he's pulled off. This guy, working out of the University of Washington, essentially taught computers to design proteins from scratch — molecules that don't exist in nature but fold exactly the way he predicts. Rosetta, the software suite his lab built, became the gold standard for protein structure prediction and design, years before the AI wave made it a hot topic. The Breakthrough Prize, the Feynman Prize, and eventually the Nobel all followed, but he was doing the hard, unglamorous computational grind long before the recognition caught up. For someone reshaping what's possible in medicine, materials science, and synthetic biology, Baker remains remarkably understated — which, honestly, makes him more impressive.

David Baker (born October 6, 1962) is an American biochemist and 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 phy…

Name (English)

David Baker

Name (Japanese)

デイヴィッド・ベイカー

Reading

でいゔぃっど・べいかー

Born

October 6, 1962 (age 63)

Zodiac / Chinese zodiac

Libra / Tiger

Origin

Seattle, Washington, United States

Blood type

Private

Height

Private

Agency

Private

Occupation

bioinformatician / biochemist / university teacher / computational biologist / biochemistry teacher

Elementary school

Private

Junior high

Private

High school

Private

University

University of California, Berkeley

Awards & achievements

• 2001 Overton Prize
• Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• 2004 Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology
• 1994 Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering
• 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry
• 2021 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences

Spouse

Private

Children

Private

Parents

Private

Siblings

Private

Motto

Private

• Official sitehttps://sites.uw.edu/biochemistry/faculty/david-baker/
• Wikipedia (Japanese)https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%87%E3%82%A4%E3%83%B4%E3%82%A3%E3%83%83%E3%83%89%E3%83%BB%E3%83%99%E3%82%A4%E3%82%AB%E3%83%BC%20(%E7%94%9F%E5%8C%96%E5%AD%A6%E8%80%85)

Tags

• Washington
• bioinformatician
• biochemist
• university teacher

Last updated

2026-06-02

Facts are limited to publicly available information up to 2024; non-public items are marked "Private / Unknown". English text is machine-assisted (facts translated by Sonnet, "My Take" written by Opus 4.8). The Japanese page is the source of record.