After working at the Laboratory for Computer Graphics and Spatial Analysis in the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University, he then attended MIT EECS, where he received his S.M.

in EECS (1984) and Ph.D. in Computer Science (1987) under the supervision of professor Tomás Lozano-Pérez in the MIT AI Lab (Artificial Intelligence Laboratory).

Previously, he was a Guggenheim Fellow (2001–2002) and received a National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award (1989–1994).

In 2015, Donald was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), for contributions to computational molecular biology.

He has developed numerous algorithms for protein design which have been successfully tested experimentally in the wet lab.

A distinct feature of his algorithms is that they use less data, and provide complexity-theoretic guarantees on time and space (See, e.g., B. R. Donald and J. Martin.

Donald is the author of Algorithms in Structural Molecular Biology, a textbook published by MIT Press (2011).