Oliver Baker

Oliver's work as a graduate student and postdoctoral scientist addressed the basic microscopic underpinnings of nerve impulses, which propagate along nerve fibers as waves of electrical voltage. The waves are generated and carried along by a seemingly orchestrated opening and closing of molecular doors in the walls of each fiber--doorways known as voltage-gated ion channels. Oliver's research in Ehud Isacoff's at UC Berkeley helped answer a fifty year-old question: “How does voltage operate the doors?” His 1996 paper, in which he shared primary authorship with Peter Larsson, made the news in Science magazine, and one great man of the field cited it as part of a "wildly exciting period" in ion-channel research.