Dorothee Kern is Co-Founder at Relay Therapeutics, a clinical-stage precision medicine company pioneering drug discovery through protein motion analysis. She is a Professor of Integrative Structural and Computational Biology at Scripps Research and former Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator since 2005.

Kern earned her BS, MS, and PhD in biochemistry from Martin Luther University in Halle, Germany, and completed postdoctoral research at UC Berkeley. She was captain of the East German national basketball team before pursuing her scientific career.

Kern is a member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has published groundbreaking research on protein dynamics and enzyme catalysis, including highly cited papers in Nature and Science.

In 2016, Kern co-founded Relay Therapeutics with a $57 million Series A, which went public in 2020 raising over $460 million. In 2020, she also co-founded MOMA Therapeutics, a pharmaceutical company focused on molecular machines and drug discovery.

Relay Therapeutics has raised over $520 million and developed multiple clinical-stage oncology programs targeting previously undruggable proteins. Kern's vision of protein dynamics-driven drug design has transformed how the pharmaceutical industry approaches difficult drug targets.