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About

Tanja Kortemme is a pioneering computational biologist whose research sits at the intersection of protein structure prediction, computational protein design, and structural bioinformatics. Working primarily at the University of California, San Francisco, she has made transformative contributions to our understanding of how proteins fold and how new protein functions can be engineered from first principles. Kortemme is perhaps best known for her groundbreaking work applying robotics-inspired conformational sampling to protein structure prediction. Her 2009 paper on sub-angstrom accuracy in protein loop reconstruction — cited nearly 500 times — demonstrated that borrowing algorithms from robotics could achieve unprecedented precision in modeling protein conformations. This work, extended in a 2013 follow-up (216 citations), became foundational to the widely used Rosetta software suite. Beyond prediction, Kortemme has championed the incorporation of backbone flexibility into computational protein design, addressing a long-standing limitation in the field. Her more recent work on accurately positioning functional residues advances the goal of designing proteins with precisely engineered active sites — a critical challenge for developing next-generation therapeutics and biotechnology tools. Her research has collectively shaped how computational scientists approach the protein design problem at atomic resolution.