I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Molecular & Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley and an Investigator in the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. I was born and raised in rural Iowa and continue to help manage my family’s farm, which was recognized in 2010 as an Iowa Heritage Farm. I attended Gustavus Adolphus College, where and earned a B.A. in Chemistry and minored in Computer Science. In 2007 I received a Ph.D. from UCSF working on membrane protein structure determination with Robert Stroud. From 2007 to 2011, I was a Life Sciences Research Foundation fellow with Pamela Silver at Harvard Medical School. Research in the Savage Lab focuses on understanding and engineering two of the most compelling biochemical systems found in nature: genome editing and carbon fixing enzyme machineries. Ultimately, this works seeks to develop enabling genome editing technology and apply it for improving photosynthetic CO2 fixation in plants. In recognition of this research I received the DOE Early Career Program Award, an NIH Director’s New Innovator Award, an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, and was selected for the 2018 “Future of Biochemistry” issue by ACS-Biochemistry.
For full research description, please visit David's Faculty Profile.
biochemistry, metabolism, photosynthetic systems, Systems and Synthetic Biology, protein engineering
