Joint winner of the 2024 Nobel prize for chemistry. He runs the Institute for Protein Design (IPD) at the University of Washington in Seattle, the leading centre for AI-driven protein design.
In the mid-1990s Dr Baker wrote software for predicting protein folding that was so influential it inspired the creation of AlphaFold, the protein-folding AI model backed by Alphabet's billions. AlphaFold's creators carried off the other half of the 2024 chemistry Nobel.
Dr Baker and his team have developed three principal AI tools for designing proteins from scratch—RFdiffusion, ProteinMPNN and RoseTTAFold—and applied them to projects ranging from covid-19 vaccines and snake-bite treatments to biofuels and novel materials.
Every improvement in communication makes the bore more terrible.