Nathan Ennist

Nathan Ennist, Ph.D. is an Acting Instructor doing research in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Washington. As part of David Baker’s group at the Institute for Protein Design (IPD), Nate mentors Ph.D. students Avi Swartz and Peik Lund-Andersen, and together they work to design new proteins for high-efficiency photosynthesis. Nate first joined the Baker group as a postdoc in 2017, when he started working on chlorophyll binding proteins for light harvesting and charge separation. Nate employs cutting edge computational protein design methods to create multi-cofactor proteins for energy transfer and electron transfer. Nate wrote a grant proposal on behalf of the Baker group for an Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) award for a project titled, “Harvesting Infrared Light to Improve Photosynthetic Biomass Production” which was funded for $1,347,122 over 3 years starting March 28, 2022. Nate has published on the de novo design of photochemical reaction center proteins and chlorophyll dimer proteins that precisely mimic the structures of native chlorophyll special pairs found in photosynthetic reaction centers (preprint).

Nate completed his Ph.D. in 2017 at the University of Pennsylvania in the lab of Prof. P. Leslie Dutton, where he designed and characterized photochemical reaction centers and oxygen transport proteins. In the Dutton group, Nate developed expertise in protein redox chemistry, anaerobic techniques, metalloprotein design, X-ray crystallography, transient absorption spectroscopy, and other spectroscopic methods.

Nate’s long-term career goal is to become a professor to continue mentoring students and working to build more efficient photosynthetic pathways for enhanced production of food and renewable fuels.

September 2023