David Asai

In 2024, David retired as Senior Director for Science Education at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.  At HHMI he created programs to advance equity and inclusion in science education, which is primarily the responsibility of the institution in which students learn and train. Current initiatives include: (i) Inclusive Excellence, (ii) Driving Change, (iii) HHMI Professors, (iv) the Science Education Alliance (SEA), (v) the Gilliam graduate program, (vi) support of advanced courses in biomedical science, and (vii) support of pre-college science education in Maryland and Virginia. To learn more, please visit https://www.hhmi.org/developing-scientists.

David received the bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Stanford and the PhD in biochemistry from Caltech.  After postdoctoral fellowships at Caltech and the University of California, Santa Barbara, he served on the faculty at Purdue University for 19 years and Harvey Mudd College for 5 years.  He was Head of Biological Sciences at Purdue and Stuart Mudd Professor and Chair of Biology at Mudd.  In 2008, David moved to HHMI.  When he was a faculty member, his lab studied the structural and functional diversity of the molecular motor dynein.  David is an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the American Society for Cell Biology.