University of Washington Professor David Baker won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry
Nobel Laureate David Baker was recognized for constructing new proteins for different applications.
(Illustration by Cortland Johnson | Pacific Northwest National Laboratory)
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced that longtime Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) collaborator David Baker was awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The University of Washington professor was recognized for his work in computational protein design.
“We congratulate David for his achievement and are excited by the spotlight it places on computational and theoretical chemistry,” said Louis Terminello, associate laboratory director of the Physical and Computational Sciences Directorate at PNNL.
Several scientists at PNNL collaborated with Baker over the years, resulting in multiple coauthored publications in high-impact journals such as Nature. PNNL coauthors include James (Jim) De Yoreo, Chris Mundy, Chun-Long Chen, Ying Chen, Marcel Baer, Gregory Schenter, Karl Mueller, Nancy Washton, Shuai Zhang, Maxim Ziatdinov, and PNNL joint appointee Sergei Kalinin. De Yoreo, Mundy, and C. Chen hold joint appointments with the University of Washington. Kalinin holds a primary appointment with the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
“Our collaboration with David and the University of Washington is an integral part of our research into bio-inspired materials,” said De Yoreo. “David’s expertise in protein design has helped us understand and predict materials structure to create new materials with specific applications.”
Baker’s initial involvement with PNNL began roughly two decades ago with an exploratory research project at the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory, a Department of Energy, Office of Science user facility at PNNL. He continued his PNNL connection through the creation of the Materials Synthesis and Simulation Across Scales (MS3) initiative nearly 8 years ago. MS3 partnered with the University of Washington’s Institute for Protein Design, which Baker directs.
The success of MS3, a Laboratory-Directed Research and Development initiative, soon led to the launch of the Northwest Institute for Materials Physics, Chemistry, and Technology (NW IMPACT), an ongoing joint research collaboration between PNNL and UW.
De Yoreo was a driving force behind many of the PNNL projects that Baker contributed to, including MS3 and NW IMPACT. De Yoreo currently serves as the deputy director for the Center for the Science of Synthesis Across Scales (CSSAS), a multi-institution Energy Frontier Research Center supported by the Department of Energy. Baker is currently a principal investigator of CSSAS.
“Through our ongoing collaborations within CSSAS, our researchers are combining computational tools with experiments to master the design of new materials,” said De Yoreo.
Published: November 7, 2024