Kurt Wüthrich is a Swiss chemist/biophysicist and Nobel Chemistry laureate, known for developing nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) methods for studying biological macromolecules.
Carlos José Bustamante is a Peruvian-American scientist. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
Bruce Michael Alberts is an American biochemist and the Emeritus Chancellor’s Leadership Chair in Biochemistry and Biophysics for Science and Education at the University of California, San Francisco. He has done important work studying the protein complexes which enable chromosome replication when living cells divide. He is known as an original author of the "canonical, influential, and best-selling scientific textbook" Molecular Biology of the Cell, as an Editor-in-Chief of Science magazine. He was awarded the National Medal of Science for "intellectual leadership and experimental innovation in the field of DNA replication, and for unparalleled dedication to improving science education and promoting science-based public policy" in 2014.
John Norman Abelson is an American molecular biologist with expertise in biophysics, biochemistry, and genetics. He was a professor at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).
Martin Karplus is an Austrian and American theoretical chemist. He is the Director of the Biophysical Chemistry Laboratory, a joint laboratory between the French National Center for Scientific Research and the University of Strasbourg, France. He is also the Theodore William Richards Professor of Chemistry, emeritus at Harvard University. Karplus received the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, together with Michael Levitt and Arieh Warshel, for "the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems".
Richard Henderson is a British molecular biologist and biophysicist and pioneer in the field of electron microscopy of biological molecules. Henderson shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2017 with Jacques Dubochet and Joachim Frank. "Thanks to his work, we can look at individual atoms of living nature, thanks to cryo-electron microscopes we can see details without destroying samples, and for this he won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry."
Andrej Šali is a computational structural biologist. Since 2003, he has been Professor in the Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences at University of California, San Francisco. He also serves as an editor of the journal Structure.
Donald L. D. Caspar was an American structural biologist known for his works on the structures of biological molecules, particularly of the tobacco mosaic virus. He was an emeritus professor of biological science at the Institute of Molecular Biophysics, Florida State University, and an emeritus professor of biology at the Rosenstiel Basic Medical Sciences Research Center, Brandeis University. He has made significant scientific contributions in virus biology, X-ray, neutron and electron diffraction, and protein plasticity.
Sir Christopher Martin Dobson was a British chemist, who was the John Humphrey Plummer Professor of Chemical and Structural Biology in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Cambridge, and Master of St John's College, Cambridge.
David A. Tirrell is an American chemist and the Ross McCollum-William H. Corcoran Professor and professor of chemistry and chemical engineering at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). A pioneer in the areas of polymer synthesis and protein biosynthesis, his research has a wide range of applications, including coatings, adhesion, lubrication, bioengineering and biomedical intervention. From 2012 to 2018, Tirrell was the director of the Beckman Institute at Caltech. As of 2017, he serves as Caltech's Provost. He is one of very few American scientists to have been elected to all three branches of the United States National Academies: the National Academy of Sciences (2006), the National Academy of Engineering (2008), and the Institute of Medicine (2011). He was elected a Member of the American Philosophical Society in 2019.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to biophysics:
David A. Agard is a professor of biochemistry and biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco. He earned his B.S. in molecular biochemistry and biophysics from Yale University and his Ph.D. in biological chemistry from California Institute of Technology. His research is focused on understanding the basic principles of macromolecular structure and function. He is a scientific director of the Institute for Bioengineering, Biotechnology, and Quantitative Biomedical Research and has been a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investigator since 1986.
Gabriel Waksman FMedSci, FRS, is Courtauld professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at University College London (UCL), and professor of structural and molecular biology at Birkbeck College, University of London. He is the director of the Institute of Structural and Molecular Biology (ISMB) at UCL and Birkbeck, head of the Department of Structural and Molecular Biology at UCL, and head of the Department of Biological Sciences at Birkbeck.
Anthony Watts is a British biochemist and Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Oxford and C W Maplethorpe Fellow in Biological Sciences and tutor at St. Hugh's College, Oxford. He is a fellow of the Royal Chemical Society, the Institute of Physics, Royal Society of Biology and Biophysical Society. He was managing director of the European Biophysics Journal, and is a co-opted member of the European Biophysical Societies' Association (EBSA), chair of the British Biophysical Society and chair of the Scientific Committee for the IUPAB/EBSA/BBS/IoP Biophysics congress, 2017. He was President of EBSA (2017-2019) and elected President-elect of IUPAB in 2021.
G. Marius Clore MAE, FRSC, FMedSci, FRS is a British-born, Anglo-American molecular biophysicist and structural biologist. He was born in London, U.K. and is a dual U.S./U.K. Citizen. He is a Member of the National Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the Royal Society, a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a NIH Distinguished Investigator, and the Chief of the Molecular and Structural Biophysics Section in the Laboratory of Chemical Physics of the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases at the U.S. National Institutes of Health. He is known for his foundational work in three-dimensional protein and nucleic acid structure determination by biomolecular NMR spectroscopy, for advancing experimental approaches to the study of large macromolecules and their complexes by NMR, and for developing NMR-based methods to study rare conformational states in protein-nucleic acid and protein-protein recognition. Clore's discovery of previously undetectable, functionally significant, rare transient states of macromolecules has yielded fundamental new insights into the mechanisms of important biological processes, and in particular the significance of weak interactions and the mechanisms whereby the opposing constraints of speed and specificity are optimized. Further, Clore's work opens up a new era of pharmacology and drug design as it is now possible to target structures and conformations that have been heretofore unseen.
Stephen L. Mayo is a professor at the California Institute of Technology, where he is the William K. Bowes Jr. Leadership Chair in the Division of Biology and Biological Engineering, and the Bren Professor of Biology and Chemistry. His research focuses on structural biology and the development of computational methods for protein design. Mayo was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences in 2004 and was appointed to a six-year term on the National Science Board in 2013.
Helen Jane Dyson is a British-born biophysicist and a professor of integrative structural and computational biology at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. She was the 15th editor-in-chief of the Biophysical Journal. She was elected a Member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2022.
Douglas Charles "Doug" Rees is an American biochemist, biophysicist, and structural biologist.
Wolfgang P. Baumeister is a German molecular biologist and biophysicist. His research has been pivotal in the development of Cryoelectron tomography.
Bonnie Ann Wallace, FRSC is a British and American biophysicist and biochemist. She is a professor of molecular biophysics in the department of biological sciences, formerly the department of crystallography, at Birkbeck College, University of London, U.K.
