Ken A. Dill

He is the director of the Louis and Beatrice Laufer Center for Physical and Quantitative Biology at Stony Brook University.[1] He obtained his Ph.D. in 1978 at UCSD in the Biology Department working with Bruno H. Zimm, studying the biophysical properties of DNA molecules.But before tackling the protein folding problem, he moved to Stanford University and worked with Paul J. Flory in Chemistry, for his post-doctoral training.After this, he went to the University of California, San Francisco, where he popularized the idea that any given protein's surrounding environment places constraints upon it, such that the shapes that it can assume are dramatically decreased.Mathematically, the folding process can be visualized as a funnel, in which the several unfolded and misfolded high energy states of the protein occupy positions nearer the top of the funnel, but once the protein begins to fold, its options narrow down with the decrease in conformational entropy and the chain rapidly collapses into its most stable, low energy state.
Oklahoma CityOklahomaAmericanMassachusetts Institute of TechnologyUniversity of California, San DiegoHydrophobic-polar protein folding modelMax Delbruck PrizePhysicsChemistryBiologyComputational BiologyStony Brook UniversityDoctoral advisorBruno H. Zimmbiophysicistchemistfolding pathways of proteinsLouis and Beatrice Laufer Center for Physical and Quantitative BiologyNational Academy of ScienceseditorAnnual Review of BiophysicsRibonucleaseStanford UniversityPaul J. FloryUniversity of California, San Francisco