This richly deserved honor is one of the highest that can be bestowed on a US scientist. Baker was one of 72 US scientists elected this year, bringing the total number of active US members to 2,013; he will be in the section of Biophysics and Computational Biology. See NAS Press Release for the full announcement. Other members of the Department of Biochemistry in the National Academy are Earl Davie, Edmond Fischer, John Glomset, and Richard Palmiter.

The National Academy of Sciences is a private organization of scientists and engineers dedicated to the furtherance of science and its use for the general welfare. The organization was established in 1863 by a congressional act of incorporation signed by Abraham Lincoln that called on the Academy to act as an official adviser to the federal government, upon request, in any matter of science or technology.

This is only the highest and most recent of Professor Baker's many honors. Baker received young investigator awards from the Packard Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the Beckman Foundation; the Irving Sigal Young Investigator Award from the Protein Society; and the Overton Award from the International Society of Computational Biology.

Baker and his research group came in first in the 2001 Computer Assisted Structure Prediction Competition ("CASP4") unimaginably far ahead of a distinguished pack of more than 100 research groups, in the fourth annual international Computer Assisted Structure Prediction Competition ("CASP4"). The computational technique developed by the Baker group, and known as ROSETTA, represents a giant step toward interpreting the nearly complete human genome sequence, as well as applying this new knowledge to drug design, genetics, and health care. Visit the News Flash for the whole story.

More recently, Baker was awarded the 2004 Foresight Institute Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology in the Theoretical category on the opening night of the institute's first Conference on Advanced Nanotechnology. Baker shared the award with former postdoctoral fellow Brian Kuhlman, now an Assistant Professor of Biochemistry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Visit the News Flash for the whole story.

Baker's current interests focus on the prediction and design of protein structures and protein-protein interactions; on improvements in the physical models underlying these techniques for design and predictions methods; and in the near future, extending these techniques to predict and redesign protein-DNA interaction specificity, to design new protein-small molecule interactions, and to design new catalysts.

Baker also has a growing interest in distributed computing (called Rosetta@home) in which idle computers around the world are harnessed to make calculations to help design new proteins to fight diseases such as HIV, malaria, cancer, and Alzheimer's. Together with William Schief, he is also engaged in an effort, sponsored by an award from the Gates Foundation, to design an HIV vaccine that is sufficiently immunogenic to elicit protective responses in humans.