David Savage | Research UC Berkeley

Research Bio

Dave is a Professor in the Department of Molecular & Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley and an Investigator in the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Dave was born and raised in rural Iowa. He continues to help manage his family’s farm, which was recognized in 2010 as an Iowa Heritage Farm. Dave attended Gustavus Adolphus College, where he earned a B.A. in Chemistry and minored in Computer Science. He received his Ph.D. in 2007 from UCSF for his work on membrane protein structure determination with Robert Stroud. From 2007 to 2011, Dave was a Life Sciences Research Foundation fellow with Pamela Silver in the Department of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School.

Research in the Savage Lab focuses on understanding and engineering two of the most compelling biochemical systems found in nature: CO2 fixation and genome editing enzyme machineries. Ultimately, this works seeks to develop enabling genome editing technology and apply it for improving photosynthetic CO2 assimilation in plants. For this work, Dave’s research has been recognized with the DOE Early Career Program Award, an NIH Director’s New Innovator Award, an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, and he was selected for the 2018 “Future of Biochemistry” issue by ACS-Biochemistry. Dave is also an enthusiastic supporter of science capacity building and translation, and he is a co-creator of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory course on synthetic biology, a founding member of the Engineering Biology Research Consortium, co-creator of the African Plant Breeding Academy CRISPR Course and a co-founder of Scribe Therapeutics.

Research Expertise and Interest

biochemistry, metabolism, photosynthetic systems, Systems and Synthetic Biology, protein engineering

In the News

a man looks at plant growing in brightly lit box

In 10 years, CRISPR Transformed Medicine. Can It Now Help Us Deal With Climate Change?

Coming from a long line of Iowa farmers, David Savage always thought he would do research to improve crops. That dream died in college, when it became clear that any genetic tweak to a crop would take at least a year to test; for some perennials and trees, it could take five to 10 years. Faced with such slow progress, he chose to study the proteins in photosynthetic bacteria instead. But the advent of CRISPR changed all that.

IGI researchers in a rice field studying microbes in the soil

Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Puts $11 Million Into Carbon Capture Research

New funding from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative kickstarts CRISPR-enabled carbon removal research at the Innovative Genomics Institute

Three new investigators named by Howard Hughes Medical Institute

The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), the nation’s largest biomedical research foundation, announced today the appointment of 33 American scientists as investigators, and three of them are from the University of California, Berkeley.

abstract illustration showing green orbs, DNA strands, blue and orange ribbons and a green circle

Using two CRISPR enzymes, a COVID diagnostic in only 20 minutes

Frequent, rapid testing for COVID-19 is critical to controlling the spread of outbreaks, especially as new, more transmissible variants emerge. A research team at the UC, Berkeley is aiming to develop a diagnostic test that is much faster and easier to deploy than the gold standard qRT-PCR diagnostic test. The team has now combined two different types of CRISPR enzymes to create an assay that can detect small amounts of viral RNA in less than an hour.

Scientists pivot to COVID-19 research, hoping for quick results to deal with pandemic

Thanks to a rapid funding program thrown together by wealthy entrepreneurs barely six weeks ago, seven COVID-19 research projects at the University of California, Berkeley, are getting an infusion of cash — $2.2 million in all — that could turn up new diagnostics and potential treatments for the infection within months.

Giving Cas9 an ‘on’ switch for better control of CRISPR gene editing

UC Berkeley researchers have now made CRISPR-Cas9 even more versatile by giving it an “on” switch, allowing users to keep the Cas9 gene editor turned off in all cells except its designated target.

Four young faculty members to receive $50,000 Sloan Research Fellowships

Four UC Berkeley faculty members have been awarded prestigious Sloan Research Fellowships, given annually by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to scientists, mathematicians and economists at an early stage of their careers.

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