Management team

The leadership and management team

Center Director, Professor Dek Woolfson FRS

Dek is Professor of Protein Design in the Department of Biology at the University of Copenhagen, and Director and Principal Investigator of the CPD. 

He also holds a position at the University of Bristol as Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry, and he splits his time between Copenhagen and Bristol.

He graduated from the University of Oxford with a degree in Chemistry (1987), and from the University of Cambridge with a PhD (1992).  He did post-doctoral research at University College London (1991 – 92) and the University of California, Berkeley (1992 – 94).   He has held positions as Lecturer in Biochemistry (University of Bristol, 1994 – 95), Lecturer through to Professor of Biochemistry (University of Sussex, 1996 – 2005), and Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry (University of Bristol, since 2005).  He took up the position in Copenhagen in August 2025.

Dek’s research is at the interface between chemistry and biology.  He applies chemical methods and principles to understand biological phenomena such as protein folding, stability, and interactions. To do this, his group focuses on the design of completely new protein structures and functions from scratch, using the resulting synthetic proteins directly in cells to study biological processes.

Dek’s work has been recognised by the Protein and Peptide Science Award (2011) and Interdisciplinary Prize (2016) of the Royal Society of Chemistry; a Humboldt Research Award (2020); the Vincent du Vigneaud Award of the American Peptide Society (2025); and election to the Fellowship of the Royal Society (2025).

Read more about Dek’s reflections on protein design

  • Computational protein design, Katherine I. Albanese, Sophie Barbe, Shunsuke Tagami, Derek N. Woolfson & Thomas Schiex
    Nature Reviews Methods Primers, 2025, DOI:/10.1038/s43586-025-00383-1
  • Understanding a protein fold: the physics, chemistry, and biology of α-helical coiled coils, Derek N. Woolfson
    Journal of Biological Chemistry, 2023DOI:10.1016/j.jbc.2023.104579
  • A brief history of de novo protein design: minimal, rational, and computational, Derek N. Woolfson
    Journal of Molecular Biology 2021, 20, 167160 DOI:10.1016/j.jmb.2021.167160

Michala Yun-Joo Schlichtkrull
Center PA, Michala Yun-Joo S Schlichtkrull

Michala has a Master of Arts in Modern Culture and China Studies, University of Copenhagen. She has worked in administration and management support at universities in Denmark and China for the past decade.