Professor David 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 post-doctoral fellow Brian Kuhlman, now an Assistant Professor of Biochemistry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Baker and Kuhlman were recognized for the development and application of Rosetta Design, a program for designing stable protein structures. The institute recognized the work as a milestone on the path toward the rational design of macromolecular machines.

The Foresight Institute is a nanotechnology think tank established in 1993 and based in Palo Alto, California. Named in honor of Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman, the Foresight Institute Feynman Prizes recognize researchers whose recent work has most advanced the field toward the achievement of Feynman's vision for nanotechnology: molecular manufacturing, defined as the construction of atomically-precise products through the use of molecular machine systems.

For information regarding the prize, see http://www.foresight.org/prize/index.php.