Current Grantee Profiles

Dr. Baker is a biochemist and computational biologist whose research focuses on the prediction of macromolecular structures and functions. He is the director of the Rosetta Commons, a consortium of labs and researchers that develop the Rosetta biomolecular structure prediction and design program, which has been extended to the distributed computing project Rosetta@Home and the online computer game Foldit. He received his Ph.D. in biochemistry at the University of California, Berkeley and did postdoctoral work in biophysics at University of California, San Francisco. Dr. Baker has received numerous awards in recognition of his work, including the AAAS Newcomb Cleveland Prize, the Sackler International Prize in Biophysics, the Overton Prize from the International Society of Computational Biology, and the Feynman Prize from the Foresight Institute. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Sciences. Dr. Baker is also the director of the University of Washington’s Institute for Protein Design.

Dr. Donahoe serves as Director of the Pediatric Surgical Research Laboratories at Massachusetts General Hospital and Marshall K. Bartlett Professor of Surgery at the Harvard Medical School. She is an Associate Member of the Broad Institute, Principle Faculty at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, and Associate Faculty of the Center for Human Genetics Research. Dr. Donahoe has published over 275 peer-reviewed publications, and holds 12 patents concerning Mullerian Inhibiting Substance (MIS). She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Institute of Medicine. Her work at the interface of clinical endocrinology in the care and reconstruction of children with intersex anomalies and research in reproductive developmental biology and oncology, led to the hypothesis that MIS could serve as a potential anticancer agent against human ovarian carcinomas as a tumor of Mullerian duct origin. Since MIS also acts in the ovary, recent work with Dr. David Pepin led to the study of MIS as a permanent contraceptive agent for cats and dogs.

Dr. Pépin joined the Harvard Medical School faculty in 2014 as an Instructor in the department of Surgery where he holds the title of Assistant in Surgery at the Massachusetts General Hospital, and Assistant in Molecular Biology at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Pépin was trained as a reproductive biologist at the University of Ottawa, Canada, where he completed a PhD elucidating the role of chromatin remodeling during ovarian development and in ovarian cancers. During his training, he demonstrated that epigenetic factors, and in particular chromatin regulators, orchestrate granulosa cell differentiation during folliculogenesis and control growth and differentiation of the ovarian follicle. In 2011, he joined the Pediatric Surgical Research Laboratories at the Massachusetts General Hospital as a Research Fellow and an Ann Schreiber Mentored Investigator, to lead the research team evaluating Mullerian Inhibiting Substance (MIS) for the treatment of ovarian cancer and for female contraception. He recently engineered new peptide modifications of the MIS recombinant protein and introduced them into an adeno-associated viral gene therapy vector for pre-clinical evaluation as a permanent sterilant in cats and dogs.

Professor Lee Smith began his career with a PhD in Molecular Genetics at the University of Warwick, UK. He then completed two postdoctoral positions at the MRC Mammalian Genetics Unit in Harwell, UK, working on mammalian sex determination and testis development. Lee moved to Edinburgh in 2006 to lead a UK Medical Research Council funded programme of research within the MRC Human Reproductive Sciences Unit. In 2012, Lee was promoted to Chair of Genetic Endocrinology and is now Head of Male Health Research at the MRC Centre for Reproductive Health within the University of Edinburgh. Although Lee retains interests in many aspects of reproductive genetics and endocrinology, his group’s primary focus is on elucidating the role of testosterone signaling in development and function of the male reproductive system.