Dek Woolfson is Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Director of the Bristol BioDesign Institute at the University of Bristol, and founding member of the Max Planck-Bristol Centre for Minimal Biology.

Dek earned his first degree in Chemistry at the University of Oxford, UK, in 1987. In 1991, he gained a Ph.D. in Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of Cambridge. He then did post-doctoral research at University College in London, 1991 – 1992, and the University of California, Berkeley, 1992 – 1994. He returned to the UK to take up a Lectureship in Biochemistry at the University of Bristol, 1994 – 1995, and from 1996 – 2005 he was Lecturer through to Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Sussex. Dek moved back to Bristol in 2005 as a Joint Chair in Chemistry and Biochemistry.

Dek’s research has always been at the interface between chemistry and biology, applying chemical methods and principles to understand biological phenomena such as protein folding and stability. He has a long-standing interest in the challenge of rational and computational protein design, and how this can be applied in synthetic biology and biotechnology. His primary research focuses on making completely new peptide assemblies and protein structures not known to natural biology using a combination of rational and computational design. The current focuses of his group are in the parametric design of peptide and protein structures, assemblies and materials, and porting these into living cells to intervene in and to augment natural biological functions.

In 2011, Dek became the first recipient of the Medimmune Protein and Peptide Science Award of the Royal Society of Chemistry. In 2014, he received a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award. He won the Interdisciplinary Prize of the Royal Society of Chemistry in 2016, and in 2020 he received a Humboldt Research Award, also known as the Humboldt Prize.