Tania A. Baker

Tania A. Baker is an American biochemist who is a Professor of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and formerly the head of the Department of Biology. She earned her B.S. in Biochemistry from University of Wisconsin–Madison and her Ph.D. in Biochemistry from Stanford University under the guidance of Arthur Kornberg. She joined the MIT faculty in 1992 and her research is focused on the mechanisms and regulation of DNA transposition and protein chaperones. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and has been a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investigator since 1994. Baker performed this research during the time it took to get her master's and Ph.D.

Career For her postdoctoral research, she worked with Kiyoshi Mizuuchi at the National Institute of Health. Retrotransposons are transposons that first transcribe the moving gene sequence into RNA. This RNA then gets retro-transcribed back into DNA, and it is this DNA that ends up being reincorporated somewhere else in the chromosome. Through her work with these different transposons, Baker started to look at unfoldases, which are a type of protein chaperone. Unfoldases serve to unfold or degrade proteins found in cells. Unfoldases are related to transposons because some of them release proteins that aid in transposition. When the proteins are released, transposition of the DNA sequence is stopped, and Baker wanted to know what caused the proteins to release from DNA. Unfoldases help to destroy proteins that have become damaged or proteins that have built up too much. They are important in ensuring that proteins are properly recycled so that cells do not constantly need new amino acids. Baker wants to figure how unfoldases work and how they are controlled by cells.