Axel Brunger

Axel Brunger move to Stanford as a Professor and Chair of the Department of Molecular and Cellular Physiology in 2000. He also holds an appointment as Investigator in the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. In 1995 he was awarded the Röntgen Prize for Biosciences from the University of Würzburg. In 2003, he received the Gregori Aminoff Award of the Royal Swedish Academy. In 2005 he was elected member of the National Academy of Sciences. In 2011 he received the DeLano Award of the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, in 2014 he received the Bernard Katz Award of the Biophysical Society, and the Carl Hermann Medal of the German Crystallographic Society, and in 2016 he received the Trueblood Award of the American Crystallographic Association.

Brunger develops tools for interpreting x-ray crystallography diffraction data as well as a major computational tool called the “free R value,” to rate a molecular model’s quality and how likely it is to be correct. The free R value has since become a standard criterion for judging agreement between a crystallographic model and its experimental x-ray diffraction data.