HENRY WALTERS was a Baltimore civic leader and the son of William T. Walters, founder of the Walters Art Gallery. This professorship, originally designated for zoology, was later redirected for a biologist, reflecting the university’s academic priorities.
One of the leading donors to the 1902 Endowment Fund Campaign, Henry Walters also played a part in the relocation of the School of Arts and Sciences from downtown Baltimore to the Homewood campus. In 1905, Mr. Walters endowed the Department of Art as Applied to Medicine at the School of Medicine, the first such program in the United States.
Held by Ernesto Freire
ERNESTO FREIRE, the Henry Walters Professor of Biology, has been a member of the departments of Biology and Biophysics and Biophysical Chemistry since 1986. Dr. Freire conducts research on HIV infection, malaria, genomic diversity, molecular recognition and drug design. He has pioneered the development of new molecular design algorithms aimed at engineering drugs that exhibit extremely high affinity and maintain their effectiveness in the face of drug resistance mutations and genomic diversity. The author or co-author of over 160 publications, Dr. Freire is on the editorial board of Proteins: Structure, Function and Genetics. He has served on many scientific advisory committees for the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, and he holds memberships in the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Chemical Society, the Protein Society and the Biophysical Society.