Erik Winfree (born September 26, 1969[1]) is an American computer scientist, bioengineer, and associate professor at California Institute of Technology.[2] He is a leading researcher into DNA computing and DNA nanotechnology.[3][4][5]
In 1998, Winfree in collaboration with Nadrian Seeman published the creation of two-dimensional lattices of DNA tiles using the "double crossover" motif. These tile-based structures provided the capability to implement DNA computing, which was demonstrated by Winfree and Paul Rothemund in 2004, and for which they shared the 2006 Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology.[3][6]
In 1999, he was named to the MIT Technology Review TR100 as one of the top 100 innovators in the world under the age of 35.[7]
He graduated from the University of Chicago with a BS, and from the Computation and Neural Systems program at the California Institute of Technology with a PhD, where he studied with John Hopfield and Al Barr.[8] He was a Lewis Thomas Postdoctoral Fellow in Molecular Biology at Princeton University.[9] He was a 2000 MacArthur Fellow. His father Arthur Winfree, a theoretical biologist, was also a MacArthur Fellow.