Cmichel67 · CC BY-SA 4.0

Pioneered computational methods for designing entirely new proteins from scratch and for predicting how a protein's sequence folds into its three-dimensional shape — tools now used to engineer everything from vaccines to industrial enzymes. He won a share of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the work, directs the University of Washington's Institute for Protein Design, and has co-founded more than a dozen biotechnology companies to put the designs to use.