Dr. Bjorkman is the David Baltimore Professor of Biology and Biological Engineering and a Merkin Institute Professor at Caltech. She received a B.A. degree in Chemistry from the University of Oregon and a Ph.D. degree in Biochemistry from Harvard University. As a graduate student and postdoctoral fellow in Don Wiley's laboratory, she solved the first crystal structure of a human histocompatibility complex molecule. She continued her postdoctoral training at Stanford with Mark Davis, where she worked on T cell receptors. She joined the faculty of Caltech in 1989. Dr. Bjorkman is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. She has received the William B. Coley Award for Distinguished Research in Fundamental Immunology (1993), the Gairdner Foundation International Award (1994), the Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Award (1996), the Max Planck Research Award (2002), the University of Oregon Department of Chemistry Alumni Achievement Award (2003), was the L'OREAL-UNESCO Women in Science North American Laureate in 2006, received an NIH Director’s Pioneer Award in 2010, the Ceppellini Award (European Federation for Immunogenetics) in 2019, was a Citation Laureate in Physiology or Medicine (2020) and received the Delphine Parrott award and the Pearl Meister Greengard prize in 2021 and the Emory Max Cooper Prize in Immunology in 2024. Dr. Bjorkman’s laboratory investigates the structural correlates of broad and potent antibody-mediated neutralization of HIV-1 and SARS-CoV-2 to inform immunogen design. In related work, they use 3D imaging techniques such as electron tomography to investigate HIV/SIV or SARS-CoV-2 infection in tissues and cells.