Dr. Boris Steipe has been a Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto's Department of Biochemistry since July 2022. In 2001, Dr. Steipe moved to Toronto where he held an appointment as associate professor in the Department for Biochemistry and the Department for Molecular Genetics at the University of Toronto. He directed the University of Toronto’s Specialist Program in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology from 2004 to 2019. Most recently he founded the Sentient Syllabus Project – an international, public-good collaborative to address questions about the fundamental changes that generative Artificial Intelligence is bringing to academia. In his quest to understand the foundations of molecular biology, he has looked to aesthetics, linguistics, and the philosophy of art – disciplines deeply connected to the sciences – to bridge the perceived gap between them.

He graduated from medical school at Ludwig-Maximilians University in 1985. In order to complete his PhD thesis on the recombinant expression and structure identification of an immunoglobulin fragment, Dr. Steipe joined Andreas Plückthun's lab at the Gene Centre of Ludwig-Maximilians University. In 1990, he joined Robert Huber's Department at the Max-Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Martinsried, Germany, after his interests shifted to protein engineering. It was there that he first proposed what is now known as the "Canonical Sequence Approximation"— the hypothesis that sequence propensities can be used to predict stability changes in a very general way was first formulated.

Dr. Steipe was appointed Research Fellow at the Gene Center of Ludwig-Maximilians University, in 1990 and where his group worked on the rational stabilization of immunoglobulin domains, on sequence determinants of protein folding and on the interplay of the protein matrix with the fluorophore in Green Fluorescent Protein; he was awarded his Habilitation in Biochemistry at the Faculty for Chemistry and Pharmacy of Ludwig-Maximilians University in 2000 when he was appointed as lecturer.


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