Dorothee Kern

Dorothee Kern is a Professor of Biochemistry at Brandeis University and the chair of the graduate program in biophysics and biochemistry. She has been an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute since 2005. Dorothee strives to understand how proteins function by understanding how they move at atomic resolution. She uses biophysical analytical methods, such as nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), x-ray crystallography and computation, to analyze protein dynamics. She has followed the high-speed motion of enzymes during biocatalysis and allosteric regulation, providing unexpected insights into how conformational change are essential for biological reactions. She has recently expanded the concept of protein motion to the evolution of proteins over billions of years by reconstructing evolutionary trajectories over billions of years in vitro. Dorothee pursues a new vision of protein dynamics and allosteric networks at the heart of improved drug design, is founder of Relay Therapeutics and MOMA Therapeutics with the mission of exploiting protein dynamics for expanding therapeutics. Dorothee grew up behind the iron curtain in east Germany where she received her BS and MS biochemistry from the Martin Luther University in Halle, where she finished her PhD after the fall of the Berlin wall. Before moving to California for her post-doc at UC Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Dorothee was captain of the German National Basketball team for many years and won an MVP award. In 1998, she joined the faculty of Brandeis University and transferred her leadership skills from the basketball court to the lab.