Four ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý professors were among the winners of the 2021 Breakthrough Prize, which recognizes groundbreaking achievements in the life sciences, fundamental physics and mathematics.

David Baker, a professor in the UW School of Medicine’s department of biochemistry, won the prize for life sciences, while a team of UW physics professors, including Eric Adelberger, Jens Gundlach and Blayne Heckel, earned the prize for fundamental physics.

The annually awards the Breakthrough Prizes, which were founded in 2013 and are dubbed the “Oscars of Science.” Each prize is worth $3 million.

Baker, director of the , was recognized for developing technology that allowed the design of proteins never seen before in nature, including novel proteins that have the potential for therapeutic intervention in human diseases.

Over billions of years, nature has produced a thousand trillion proteins — the workhorse molecules essential to every life function — each with a unique origami-style design that allows it to precisely lock onto an adjacent molecule to perform its unique function. Then came the Protein Design Revolution, harnessing supercomputing and newly discovered principles of how natural proteins fold to turn evolution on its head.

“We could wait another million years for the protein we need to evolve, or we could design it ourselves,” Baker said. His enthusiastic design community of 250,000 — citizen scientists, Foldit players and gamers — uses a combination of human ingenuity and automated computational firepower. Their latest project is a promising crowd-sourced novel protein that could adhere to a COVID-19 virus and destroy it.

“One-hundred people will approach the solution to a problem from 100 different perspectives,” said Baker, who invented the open-source Rosetta software for computational modeling and analysis of novel proteins. The promise of protein design? Universal vaccines for flu, HIV, COVID-19 and cancer; medicines for chronic pain; smart therapeutics; nanoengineering for solar energy capture, and more.

“I am excited about this award accelerating progress at the IPD in de novo design of new proteins not found in nature to address current challenges in medicine and beyond,“ Baker said. “I thank my wonderful colleagues — undergraduate and graduate students, postdocs, faculty and staff — at the IPD and UW, and members of the general public contributing to our efforts through the rosetta@home and Foldit projects.“

The award gives Baker and Gundlach, longtime friends who go on hikes and climbs together, something new to talk about the next time they hit the trails.

“David is very well deserving of this prize,” said Gundlach, who currently serves as principal investigator on the ’s research in physics. “He has really pioneered the field of protein folding in a major way.”

The Eöt-Wash Group, made up of UW physicists Adelberger, Gundlach and Heckel, was recognized for precision fundamental measurements that test our understanding of gravity, probe the nature of dark energy and establish limits on couplings to dark matter is.

“I think the award was quite unexpected to all of us, but as a surprise it generates even more joy,” Gundlach said. “Presenting our research to the public was always rewarding because our experiments are intriguing and fun to hear about, but knowing that a panel of famous physicists selected our work feels particularly rewarding.”

The equivalence principle — the observation that objects, whatever they are made of, fall with the same acceleration — inspired Albert Einstein’s relativistic theory of gravity. Motivated by the unexplained phenomena of dark matter and dark energy that hint towards new physics, as well as theoretical attempts to develop unified quantum theories of gravity that inherently predict violations of the equivalence principle and additional curled-up space dimensions, the UW Eöt-Wash team decided to probe the fundamental properties of gravity with a new generation of instruments.

They took the two-century-old torsion balance concept and developed it into a supremely sensitive 21st-century instrument to look for new fundamental physics. They tested the equivalence principle, the inverse square law, and measured the gravitational constant with unprecedented precision and sensitivity. For example, their latest inverse-square law test probed gravity at ultra-short distances, establishing that any extra dimension must be curled up with a radius less than one-third the diameter of a human hair.

Last year, Lukasz Fidkowski, an assistant professor of physics at the UW, won the New Horizons in Physics Prize from the Breakthrough Foundation. At least three researchers associated with the UW have received Breakthrough prizes in prior years.

Each year, the Prize is celebrated at a gala award ceremony, where the awards are presented by superstars of movies, music, sports and tech entrepreneurship. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, however, this year’s ceremony has been postponed until March 2021.

For more information, contact Victor Balta at balta@uw.edu.

On Aug. 17, 2017, at 5:41 a.m. Pacific Time, those waves arrived at Earth and were picked up by three intricate, kilometers-long gravitational wave detectors, one of which is in Washington state. This gravitational wave signal briefly preceded a faint light signal from the same event, which was picked up by several Earth- and space-based astronomical observatories. This scientific feat by the U.S.-based Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and Europe-based Virgo detector, along with partners at approximately 70 observatories.

“Today’s announcement marks the first time that we have detected gravitational waves from the merger of two neutron stars,” said , assistant professor of physics at the ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý Bothell. “In addition, this is the first time that other observatories detected electromagnetic waves emanating from the astronomical event that generated these gravitational waves.”

Key is one of three UW faculty members who are part of the LIGO-Virgo collaboration, along with professor and acting assistant professor , both in the Department of Physics at the UW’s Seattle campus. Gundlach and Venkateswara work on instruments to improve the accuracy of detectors. Key and her group .

“This is a huge, collaborative effort — bringing together scientists from across the globe to measure events predicted by Einstein’s theory,” said Gundlach. “Einstein, however, was wrong in claiming that it would be technically impossible to detect gravitational waves.”

Previously confirmed in 2015 and earlier this year all came from mergers of black holes, events that emit no visible light. But since the neutron star merger detected on Aug. 17 also emitted electromagnetic waves, Earth- and space-based observatories picked up signals such as light emissions and gamma ray bursts. It marks the first time that a cosmic event has been detected using both gravitational waves and electromagnetic waves.

LIGO consists of two ultrasensitive detectors in the United States, one at Hanford, Washington and the other in Livingston, Louisiana. Gundlach joined the LIGO team to help those detectors pick up the fantastically small movements caused by gravitational waves, which is no small task given the dynamic environment on our planet.

“Anything that causes drag on the instruments in the detector or affects their precision in any way creates ‘noise,’ which can obscure the tiny signals left by gravitational waves,” said Gundlach.

Gundlach’s group studied subtle disturbances to the LIGO detectors — which would limit the sensitivity of the detectors — and appeared to be caused by residual air molecules in the vacuum chambers or interference from electrostatic sources. Venkateswara joined Gundlach’s team as a postdoctoral researcher in 2011 to develop methods to reduce interference caused by wind, which could blow against the building and obscure signals from gravitational waves.

“The LIGO detectors have had this long-standing problem related to ’tilt’ from wind action,” said Venkateswara. “The instrumentation within the detectors is so sensitive that — even though they operate indoors and in a vacuum — wind blowing outside the building caused the detector to malfunction.”

Venkateswara, Gundlach and doctoral student Michael Ross invented novel devices  that could accurately pick up imperceptibly small tilt of the ground. From 2014 to 2016, Venkateswara and Ross then installed, maintained and tested these sensors at the LIGO detector at Hanford, ensuring that ground tilt could be filtered out of detector measurements. These efforts improved the accuracy and efficiency of observations at Hanford. Now, Venkateswara is preparing to install similar sensors at the Livingston detector.

That will mean more data to analyze for Key and her group at UW Bothell, which includes researcher Matt DePies and students Andrew Clark, Holly Gummelt, Paul Marsh, Jomardee Perkins and Katherine Reyes.

The Bothell team works on estimating the physical parameters of gravitational wave data from the detectors, helping to determine their origin in the universe, strength and other properties. They also develop analysis tools to filter out noise from the detectors to improve data quality. Marsh spent this past summer at the Hanford LIGO detector working with the control systems on site.

“These are incredibly precise instruments, but they require a great deal of maintenance, calibration and upkeep,” said Key. “And even after the data come out, there is more work to be done before we can understand the observations themselves.”

These observations add new dimensions to astronomical events that were previously only observable by electromagnetic waves, said Key. Direct — and increasingly precise — detections of gravitational waves also give scientists new opportunities to measure phenomena that, up until recently, were only theories on paper or indirect observations, added Gundlach.

“These collaborations are an ongoing and expanding process,” said Gundlach. “More detectors, better instruments and improved analysis tools — it all gives us so much more insight into figuring out our universe.”

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LIGO is funded by the, and operated by �����Ի���, which conceived of LIGO and led the Initial and Advanced LIGO projects. Financial support for the Advanced LIGO project was led by the NSF with Germany (), the U.K. () and Australia () making significant commitments and contributions to the project. More than 1,200 scientists and some 100  from around the world participate in the effort through the , which includes the GEO Collaboration and the Australian collaboration OzGrav. Additional partners are listed at 

The Virgo collaboration consists of more than 280 physicists and engineers belonging to 20 different European research groups: six from  (CNRS) in France; eight from the  (INFN) in Italy; two in the Netherlands with ; the MTA Wigner RCP in Hungary; the POLGRAW group in Poland; the University of Valencia in Spain; and the European Gravitational Observatory, EGO, the laboratory hosting the Virgo detector near Pisa in Italy, funded by CNRS, INFN and Nikhef.

For more information, contact Gundlach at jens@phys.washington.edu, Key at joeykey@uw.edu and Venkateswara at kvenk@u.washington.edu.

For the first time, scientists have observed ripples in the fabric of spacetime called gravitational waves, arriving at the Earth from a cataclysmic event in the distant universe. This confirms a major prediction of Albert Einstein’s 1915 general theory of relativity and opens an unprecedented new window onto the cosmos.

Gravitational waves carry information about their dramatic origins and about the nature of gravity that cannot otherwise be obtained. Physicists have concluded that the detected gravitational waves were produced during the final fraction of a second of the merger of two black holes to produce a single, more massive spinning black hole. This collision of two black holes had been predicted but never observed.

The gravitational waves were detected on Sept. 14, 2015 at 5:51 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time (09:51 UTC) by both of the twin Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) detectors, located in Livingston, Louisiana, and Hanford, Washington. The LIGO Observatories are funded by the National Science Foundation, and were conceived, built, and are operated by California Institute of Technology and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The discovery, accepted for publication in the journal Physical Review Letters, was made by the LIGO Scientific Collaboration (which includes the GEO Collaboration and the Australian Consortium for Interferometric Gravitational Astronomy) and the Virgo Collaboration using data from the two LIGO detectors.

Two scientists from the ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý were part of the LIGO collaboration, physics professor and physics postdoctoral researcher Krishna Venkateswara.

“This is a huge achievement for our colleagues at LIGO,” said Gundlach. “They detected a phenomenally small signature of this black hole collision — and it marks the first time gravitational waves, predicted by Einstein in his theory of general relativity, have been .”

LIGO scientists estimate that the black holes for this event were about 29 and 36 times the mass of the sun. According to general relativity, a pair of black holes orbiting each other would lose energy through the emission of gravitational waves, and gradually approach each other over billions of years. During the final fraction of a second, the two black holes collide, releasing energy as a burst of gravitational waves about three times the mass of the sun. It is these gravitational waves that LIGO observed, though the collision occurred 1.3 billion years ago.

Gundlach and Venkateswara’s involvement with LIGO began when LIGO scientists and engineers were designing and upgrading the twin detectors in Louisiana and Washington.

“Our group at the ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý mostly specialized in testing fundamental aspects of gravity, not detecting gravitational waves,” said Gundlach. “But in the process, we learned about very subtle phenomena that can generate unwanted noise in gravitational wave detectors. For example, we studied the effects of residual gas molecules or minute amounts of electric charges on surfaces.”

More recently, the UW scientists also designed and constructed ultrasensitive tilt meters for the Washington-based LIGO detector, which help understand and reduce the effects of ground motion on the detector’s measurements.

“The LIGO detectors are a totally new type of instrument pushing many components to new extremes,” said Gundlach. “So, designing and constructing them required input from many researchers with a wide array of expertise. The detectors must sense incredibly minute length changes caused by the passing gravitational wave while they have to be insensitive to plethora of disturbances, including ground motion.”

The discovery was made possible by the enhanced capabilities of Advanced LIGO, a major upgrade that increases the sensitivity of the instruments compared to the first generation LIGO detectors, enabling a large increase in the volume of the universe probed — and the discovery of gravitational waves during its first observation run. The National Science Foundation leads in financial support for Advanced LIGO. Funding organizations in Germany (Max Planck Society), the U.K. (Science and Technology Facilities Council, STFC) and Australia (Australian Research Council) also have made significant commitments to the project. Several of the key technologies that made Advanced LIGO so much more sensitive have been developed and tested by the German UK GEO collaboration. Significant computer resources have been contributed by the AEI Hannover Atlas Cluster, the LIGO Laboratory, Syracuse University, and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Several universities designed, built and tested key components for Advanced LIGO: The Australian National University, the University of Adelaide, the University of Florida, Stanford University, Columbia University and Louisiana State University.

LIGO research is carried out by the LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC), a group of more than 1,000 scientists from universities around the United States and in 14 other countries. More than 90 universities and research institutes in the LSC develop detector technology and analyze data; approximately 250 students are strong contributing members of the collaboration. The LSC detector network includes the LIGO interferometers and the GEO600 detector. The GEO team includes scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute, AEI), Leibniz Universität Hannover, along with partners at the University of Glasgow, Cardiff University, the University of Birmingham, other universities in the United Kingdom, and the University of the Balearic Islands in Spain.

LIGO was originally proposed as a means of detecting these gravitational waves in the 1980s by Rainer Weiss, professor of physics, emeritus, from MIT; Kip Thorne, Caltech’s Richard P. Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics, emeritus; and Ronald Drever, professor of physics, emeritus, also from Caltech.

Virgo research is carried out by the Virgo Collaboration, consisting of more than 250 physicists and engineers belonging to 19 different European research groups: Six from Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in France; eight from the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN) in Italy; two in The Netherlands with Nikhef; the Wigner RCP in Hungary; the POLGRAW group in Poland; and the European Gravitational Observatory (EGO), the laboratory hosting the Virgo detector near Pisa in Italy.

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For more information, contact Gundlach at 206-616-3012 or jens@phys.washington.edu.

Adapted from by LIGO.

“There are other single-molecule tools around, but our new tool is far more sensitive,” said senior author and UW physics professor . “We can really pick up atomic-scale movements that a protein imparts onto DNA.”

As can happen in the scientific process, they developed this tool — the single-molecule picometer-resolution nanopore tweezers, or SPRNT — while working on a related project.

The UW team has been exploring to read DNA sequences quickly. Our genes are long stretches of DNA molecules, which are made up of combinations of four chemical DNA “letters.” In their approach, Gundlach and his team measure an electrical current through a biological pore called MspA, which is embedded within a modified cell membrane. As DNA passes through a tiny opening in the pore — an opening that is just 0.00000012 centimeters wide, or 1/10,000th the width of a human hair — the current shifts based on the sequence of DNA letters. They use these changes in current to infer DNA sequences.

Gundlach and his team, in the process of investigating nanopore sequencing, tried out a variety of molecular motors to move DNA through the pore. They discovered that their experimental setup was sensitive enough to observe motions much smaller than the distance between adjacent letters on the DNA. As they report in their paper, SPRNT is more than seven times more sensitive than existing techniques to measure interactions between DNA and proteins.

“Generally, most existing techniques to look at single-molecule movements — such as optical tweezers — have a resolution, at best, of about 300 picometers,” said Gundlach. “With SPRNT, we can have 40 picometer resolution.”

For reference, 40 picometers are 0.000000004 centimeters, or about 0.0000000016 inches.

“We realized we can detect minute differences in the position of the DNA in the pore,” said UW physics postdoctoral researcher , a co-author on the paper. “We could pick up differences in how the proteins were binding to DNA and moving it through the pore.”

These differences account for the unique role each cellular protein plays as it interacts with DNA. Cells have proteins to copy DNA, “read” DNA to express genes and repair DNA when it is damaged. There are cellular proteins that unwind DNA, while others bunch DNA tightly together. Biologists have long recognized that proteins have different structures to perform these roles, but the physical motion of proteins as they work on DNA has been difficult to detect directly.

“When you have the kind of resolution that SPRNT offers, you can start to pick apart the minute steps these proteins take,” said Laszlo.

Gundlach and his team show that SPRNT is sensitive enough to differentiate between the mechanisms that two cellular proteins use to pass DNA through the nanopore opening. One protein, which normally copies DNA, moves along the DNA one letter at a time as it guides DNA through the pore. The second protein, which normally unwinds DNA, instead takes two steps along each DNA letter, which they could pick up by tracking minute changes in the current, according to co-author and UW physics doctoral student Jonathan Craig. They even discovered that these two steps involve sequential chemical processes that the protein uses to walk along DNA.

“You can really see the underlying mechanisms, and that has a ton of implications — from understanding how life works to drug design,” said Laszlo.

Gundlach believes this tool may open a new window for understanding how cellular proteins process DNA, which could help genetically engineer proteins to perform novel jobs. These fine details may also help scientists understand how mutations in proteins can lead to disease or find protein properties that would be ideal targets for drug therapies.

“For example, viral genes code for their own proteins that process their DNA,” said Gundlach. “If we can use SPRNT to screen for drugs that specifically disrupt the functioning of these proteins, it may be possible to interfere with viruses.”

Other UW authors on the paper include lead author , a postdoctoral researcher in physics, and Brian Ross, Henry Brinkerhoff, Ian Nova, Kenji Doering and Benjamin Tickman. Co-authors at Illumina are Kevin Gunderson, Eric Stava, Mostafa Ronaghi and Jeffrey Mandell. Gundlach’s laboratory received funding for this project from the National Institutes of Health’s $1,000 Genome Project, grant number R01HG005115.

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For more information, contact Gundlach at 206-543-8774 or gundlach@uw.edu.