Dr. Tanja Kortemme
Science Advisory Board
Dr. Kortemme is a computational biologist and biochemist. She is currently a professor in the Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF). Her lab has pioneered computational methods for designing proteins de novo without starting from proteins existing in nature. Her group seeks to engineer new biological functions from scratch, as well as to understand how natural proteins function spanning scales from atoms to organisms.
Born in Germany, Dr. Kortemme moved to the University of Washington Seattle as an EMBO and Human Frontiers Science Program postdoctoral fellow in 1999 and joined the faculty of UCSF in 2004. Dr. Kortemme received a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation in 2008, a W.M. Keck Foundation Medical Research Award in 2013, and was elected as a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) in 2019. She was named an inaugural Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Senior Investigator in 2017.
Dr. Kortemme received her Vordiplom (B.Sc.) and Diplom (M.Sc.) in Chemistry, Biochemistry, and Biophysics from the Leibniz University Hannover, Germany, and then a Ph.D. in Biochemistry for work at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany. She has been on the Science Advisory Board of the Curci Foundation since 2024.