Kenneth Austin Dill (born 1947) is a biophysicist and chemist best known for his work in folding pathways of proteins. He is the director of the

Louis and Beatrice Laufer Center for Physical and Quantitative Biology The Louis and Beatrice Laufer Center for Physical and Quantitative Biology (Laufer Center) is a multidisciplinary venue where research from such fields as biology, biochemistry, chemistry, computer science, engineering, genetics, mathematics, and p ...

Stony Brook University Stony Brook University (SBU), officially the State University of New York at Stony Brook, is a public research university in Stony Brook, New York. Along with the University at Buffalo, it is one of the State University of New York system's ...

. He was elected a member of the

National Academy of Sciences The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the Nati ...

in 2008.S. Gupta, 2012, Profile of Ken A. Dill, ''Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.'' 109(9):3194–3196 (February 28, 2012), DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1200576109, se

accessed 6 June 2014. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2014. He has been a co-editor or editor-in-chief, editor of the '' Annual Review of Biophysics'' since 2013.

Life

Dill was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma in 1947. He attended MIT where he obtained a S.B. and S.M. in Mechanical Engineering (1971). He obtained his Ph.D. in 1978 at UCSD in the Biology Department working with

Bruno H. Zimm Bruno Hasbrouck Zimm (October 31, 1920 – November 26, 2005) was an American chemist. He was a professor of chemistry and biochemistry from University of California, San Diego, and a leading polymer chemist and DNA researcher. Early life Zi ...

, studying the biophysical properties of DNA molecules. Towards the end of his doctoral research, he had become interested in the mechanics of protein folding, specifically the way that the RNA-degrading enzyme Ribonuclease, folds into its native state. But before tackling the protein folding problem, he moved to

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

and worked with Paul J. Flory in Chemistry, for his post-doctoral training. After this, he went to the University of California, San Francisco, where he popularized the idea that any given protein's surrounding environment places constraints upon it, such that the shapes that it can assume are dramatically decreased. Dill introduced a toy model consisting of tethered beads on a lattice to mimic a folding protein, with beads of the same type (i.e. hydrophobic) attracting each other. Mathematically, the folding process can be visualized as a funnel, in which the several unfolded and misfolded high energy states of the protein occupy positions nearer the top of the funnel, but once the protein begins to fold, its options narrow down with the decrease in conformational entropy and the chain rapidly collapses into its most stable, low energy state. This state is sometimes identified with the native state of a natural protein. In Dill's words, "Like skiers all arriving at the same lodge, the folding protein gets systematically closer to the desired protein shape as it moves down the funnel".

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Dill, Ken A. Living people Molecular modelling Stony Brook University faculty University of California, San Francisco faculty MIT School of Engineering alumni University of California, San Diego alumni American biophysicists Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences 1947 births Computational chemists Annual Reviews (publisher) editors Presidents of the Biophysical Society Fellows of the American Physical Society