Ad Bax

Adriaan "Ad" Bax ( * 1956 in Zevenbergen ) is a Dutch- American chemist. He is at the Laboratory of Chemical Physics, National Institutes of Health in Bethesda (Maryland).

Bax studied at the Delft University of Technology with a diploma in 1978 and his doctorate in 1981 on two-dimensional NMR techniques. During his doctoral studies, he was also at the Laboratory of Physical Chemistry of the University of Oxford in Ray Freeman. As a post - graduate student he was at Colorado State University ( National Solid State NMR Facility) with Gary Maciel. From 1983 he was at the Laboratory of Chemical Physics of the NIH, where he led since 1983, the Department of Biophysical NMR spectroscopy. He was Distinguished Investigator of the NIH in 2005.

Bax is concerned with the NMR and their application in chemistry, biochemistry and biology and development process of the improved derivative of the three-dimensional structure of biological substances (proteins and RNA) from NMR data and examined their dynamics by NMR.

In the late 1980s he was a pioneer in triple- resonance NMR experiments, in which the investigated molecules with nitrogen 15 and carbon 13 are enriched isotopes.

Further developed by him and his group methods are based on the chemical shift and residual dipolar coupling ( Residual Dipolar Coupling), said to be examined substances are dissolved in liquid crystal media, which caused that the dipole - dipole coupling is no longer rotational diffusion path means and so long-range orders in the molecule by NMR are measurable.

Using the techniques he also investigated the structure and dynamics of proteins in membranes, such as hemagglutinin ( influenza virus A) and Gp41 of HIV.

He is one of the most cited chemists in the world ( he was among the Thomson Reuters Citation Laureates 2002-2005).

He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the National Academy of Sciences ( 2002), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2002) and a corresponding member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences ( 1994). 2006 to 2008 he was president of the International Society of Magnetic Resonance. In 2009 he became an honorary doctorate at the Free University of Brussels. In 2003 he received the Glenn T. Seaborg Medal and he received the Gold Medal of the Dutch Chemical Society.

31081
de