David Baker is Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Washington and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He received his Ph.D. degree in biochemistry with Randy Schekman at the University of California, Berkeley and did postdoctoral work in biophysics with David Agard at UCSF. Dr. Baker received young investigator awards from the National Science Foundation and the Beckman Foundation, and the Packard Foundation fellowship in Science and Engineering. He has also received the Irving Sigal award from the Protein Society and the Overton Prize from the International Society of Computational Biology. He is a recipient of the Feynman Prize from the Foresight Institute, the AAAS Newcomb Cleveland prize, the Sackler prize in biophysics, and the 2012 Centenary award from the Biochemical society. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Sciences. Dr. Baker's research is focused on determining the structures of naturally occurring proteins and designing new proteins with new structures and functions. His group has designed potent influenza virus inhibitors and HIV vaccine candidates, and is broadly interested in the design of new therapeutics. Dr. Baker's group is also exploring new routes to involving the public in biomedical discovery and therapeutic design through the Rosetta@home distributed computing project and the FoldIt on line protein folding and design game.