Erik Winfree

Erik Winfree (born September 26, 1969) is an American applied computer scientist, bioengineer, and professor at California Institute of Technology. He is a leading researcher into DNA computing and DNA nanotechnology.

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.

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.

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 under his advisors John Hopfield and Al Barr. He was a Lewis Thomas Postdoctoral Fellow in Molecular Biology at Princeton University. He was a 2000 MacArthur Fellow. His father Arthur Winfree, a theoretical biologist, was also a MacArthur Fellow.