Erik Winfree (born September 26, 1969[1]) is an American applied computer scientist, bioengineer, and professor at California Institute of Technology.
[3][4][5] In 1998, Winfree in collaboration with Nadrian Seeman published the creation of two-dimensional lattices of DNA tiles using the "double crossover" motif.
These tile-based structures provided the capability to implement DNA computing, which was demonstrated by Winfree and Paul Rothemund in 2004, and for which they shared the 2006 Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology.
[7] He received a Bachelor of Science from the University of Chicago in 1991 and a Doctor of Philosophy from the California Institute of Technology in 1998.
[8] For his doctoral studies, he enrolled in the Computation and Neural Systems program at Caltech under advisors John Hopfield and Al Barr.