Daniel Southworth earned his BS from UC Santa Cruz and his PhD from Johns Hopkins University, School of Medicine, in Baltimore, MD. There, he worked under the guidance of Rachel Green, studying fundamental mechanisms of protein translation catalyzed by the ribosome. He completed his postdoctoral work at UCSF in the David Agard Lab, where he gained expertise in cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) and determined structures and nucleotide-specific states of the Hsp90 molecular chaperone that underlie its dynamic conformational cycle.

In 2011, Dr. Southworth accepted a faculty position at the University of Michigan in the Life Sciences Institute and Department of Biological Chemistry. There, his lab focused on understanding molecular chaperone-driven protein quality control mechanisms that are critical to protein folding and cellular stress responses. Dr. Southworth joined the IND at UCSF in 2017 as an Associate Professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics. His lab continues to study protein quality control and neurodegenerative disease pathways, using biochemistry and cryo-EM methods to determine the structure and mechanism of chaperones and other molecular machines that are critical to proteome function and maintenance.