Croonian Medal Prize Lecture: Advances in computational protein design

Join us for the Croonian Prize Lecture delivered by Dr David Baker.
 
The Croonian Medal and Lecture 2026 is awarded to Dr David Baker for pioneering the design of completely new proteins as well as playing key roles in the development of protein structure prediction and protein engineering tools.
 
Proteins mediate the critical processes of life and beautifully solve the challenges faced during the evolution of modern organisms. The focus of Dr David Baker’s lab is the design of a new generation of proteins that address current-day problems not faced during evolution. In contrast to traditional protein engineering efforts which modify naturally occurring proteins, they design new proteins from scratch to optimally solve these problems. Dr Baker’s lab develop and use deep learning methods to design these new proteins with new functions, produce synthetic genes encoding the designs, and characterize them experimentally.
 
In this talk, he will describe the design of proteins to address current challenges in health, technology, and sustainability.