A. Keith Dunker

Biography

Professor A. Keith Dunker, Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, Indiana University School of Medicine, received a BS in Chemistry (1965) from the University of California, Berkeley, an MS in Physics (1967) and a PhD in Biophysics (1969) from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and postdoctoral experience (1969-1973) in structural and molecular biology at Yale University. He has held positions at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (1973-1975), Washington State University (1975-2003) and Indiana University School of Medicine (2003-present). On November 15, 1995, Dr Dunker abruptly switched his research from studies on the structure, cell penetration, and assembly of the filamentous phage fd to machine-learning-based studies on intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs) and regions (IDRs), with a focus on the following 3 questions: 1. Why don’t IDPs and IDRs fold into 3D structure? 2. How common are IDPs and IDRs? 3. What are the functions of IDPs and IDRs? This early work included publications showing how amino acid compositions of IDPs and IDRs differ from the compositions of structured proteins, the development of the first composition-based predictors of disordered proteins, computational experiments showing that eukaryotes have much more predicted disorder than do prokaryotes, and additional computational experiments showing that IDP and IDR functions are different from and complementary to those of structured proteins. To promote the formation of collaborations among the community of researchers focused on IDPs and IDRs, in 2007 Dr. Dunker and collaborators established the Intrinsically Disordered Protein Subgroup of the US Biophysical Society and in 2010 established the Intrinsically Disordered Protein Gordon Research Conference. From 2014-2018 Dr. Dunker was recognized as a Highly Cited Researcher by Clarivate Analytics, mostly due to the large number of publications that cite his pioneering work on IDPs and IDRs, and in December 2020, Dr. Dunker’s Google Scholar profile reached an h-index value of 100, achieving the standard to become a Google Scholar Highly Cited Researcher. In December 2021, Dr. Dunker became a Fellow of the International Society for Computational Biology, being recognized as “A pioneer of the development and application of statistical and computational methods to understand the prevalence, the patterns of evolution, and the functional repertoire of intrinsically disordered proteins across all domains of life.”