The focus of the lab has been the coupling of theoretical, computational, and experimental approaches for the study of structural biology. In particular, we have placed a major emphasis on developing quantitative methods for protein design with the goal of developing a fully systematic design strategy that we call "protein design automation." Our design approach has been captured in a suite of software programs called ORBIT (Optimization of Rotamers By Iterative Techniques) and has been applied to a variety of problems ranging from protein fold stabilization to enzyme design.