David Baker

David Baker (born 1962) is an American biochemist and computational biologist at the University of Washington, where he directs the Institute for Protein Design. In 2024 he was awarded half of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for computational protein design; the other half went to DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis and John Jumper for predicting protein structures with AlphaFold.

AI-designed proteins

Baker’s lab pioneered the software — Rosetta, RoseTTAFold and the diffusion-based RFdiffusion — that lets scientists dream up entirely new proteins atom by atom, rather than merely cataloguing those evolution already made. He credits deep learning with transforming the field: DeepMind’s AlphaFold2, he has said, was “a wake-up call” to the power of the approach, one that inspired rather than threatened his own team. Where earlier design methods succeeded once in tens of thousands of tries, AI-driven diffusion pushed success rates into the single-digit percentages.

The payoff is concrete: designer proteins that neutralize viruses, target cancer cells, and contributed to computationally designed vaccine components. Baker runs a “communal brain” of more than a hundred researchers and has become the leading real-world advocate for AI as an accelerant of scientific discovery — the counterweight, in the debate, to those who see the technology mainly as hype or hazard.