Zoran Popović: Recruiting Gamers to Fight Disease

Proteins are the workhorses of our cells: They turn food into energy and determine our health. Each one is a chain of molecules—sometimes thousands of links long—that folds in a distinctive way. Understanding how they fold can help scientists block diseases, but there are so many variables involved that even powerful computers struggle to do it.

Enter Zoran Popović. The Serbian computer scientist emigrated to the U.S. in the late 1980s and got a scholarship to Brown University. He knew so little about the school he thought he’d be studying on an island off the coast of Massachusetts called “Rhodes.” In 2000 the University of Washington hired him to teach computer science, and he earned a reputation for pushing the state-of-the-art in gaming graphics.