David Agard

FOUNDING SCIENTIFIC DIRECTOR

Professor, Departments of Biochemistry & Biophysics and Pharmaceutical Chemistry, University of California, San Francisco, CA

David A. Agard, Ph.D. is a Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco. His current research focuses on elucidating the mechanism of cytosolic protein homeostasis as driven by the Hsp90 and Hsp70 molecular chaperones and their roles in human health and disease. Additional areas focus on the structure and organization of centrosomes, basal bodies, and cilia, and the structure and complex cell biology of the nuclear compartment encoded by jumbo bacteriophage. Accompanying this is a continuing effort to develop new technologies for high-resolution cryoEM and cryoET.

David was the founding Director and subsequently, a Scientific Director of the multi-campus Institute for Bioengineering, Biotechnology, and Quantitative Biomedical Research between 2001–2006, and he was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Investigator from 1986 to 2019. He earned his B.S. in Molecular Biochemistry and Biophysics from Yale University and his Ph.D. in biological chemistry from the California Institute of Technology and did his postdoc at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England. David was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2007 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009.