Lynda Stuart, MD, PhD

Lynda Stuart is the Executive Director of the Institute for Protein Design, overseeing translational research, institute operations, and corporate and foundation collaborations.

Lynda is a physician, scientist, and advocate for healthcare as a human right with over 20 years of experience in immunology, global health, and product development. Her experience transforming laboratory breakthroughs into real-world impact guides our mission to create proteins that solve modern challenges in medicine, technology, and sustainability. She is a professor of practice at the University of Washington School of Medicine.

As Deputy Director for Vaccines & Human Immunology at the Gates Foundation from 2016 to 2022, Lynda oversaw the development and distribution of vaccines, biologics, and antibody therapies to address urgent global health challenges. Notably, she led the Foundation’s COVID-19 discovery and translational vaccine response efforts, managing a large portfolio of COVID-19 and pan-coronavirus vaccine candidates. During this period, she collaborated closely with the Institute for Protein Design and guided the development and approval of the computationally designed COVID-19 vaccine SKYCovione. Since leaving the Gates Foundation, Dr. Stuart was the Vice President of Infectious Disease at the mRNA company BioNTech.

Dr. Stuart received a PhD from the University of Edinburgh and an MD from the University of Cambridge and the University of London. She has served on the Massachusetts General Hospital Executive Committee for Research and as an affiliate of the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT.