David Drew is a New Zealand–born structural biochemist who has advanced our fundamental understanding of how SLC transporters move small molecules across cell membranes. By determining multiple conformational states of a Na⁺/H⁺ exchanger, his group helped establish the elevator model, first seen in glutamate transporters, as a general mechanism used by many SLC transporters. His work has further revealed the first structures of mammalian Na⁺/H⁺ exchangers important for intracellular pH regulation, including the only transporter known to be regulated by voltage-sensing domains, a protein critical to sperm motility and fertilization. His group has also elucidated the determinants underlying substrate-catalysed translocation in glucose GLUT transporters, essential for the organism-wide distribution of glucose and other sugars. More recently, his group resolved the long-standing question of how ATP enters the endoplasmic reticulum. The Drew lab continues to integrate cryo-EM, biochemistry, and membrane biophysics, with a growing interest in how house-keeping SLC transporters function within their native physiological environment, including regulation by lipids and other accessory proteins.

David completed his PhD at Stockholm University in 2005, where he pioneered the use of GFP as a folding reporter to screen and optimize membrane proteins for structural studies, a method that later became the dominant go-to approach in the field. In 2009, after an EMBO postdoctoral fellowship, he established his own research group at Imperial College London as a Royal Society University Research Fellow, focusing on GLUT transporters and Na⁺/H⁺ exchangers. In 2013, he returned to Stockholm University, where he now resides at the Science for Life Laboratory as a Wallenberg Scholar and Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics.

David is a member of EMBO and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. He has received numerous distinctions for his work on SLC transporters, including the Svedberg Prize, the Tage Erlander Prize, the Göran Gustafsson Prize, the Arrhenius Medal, and ERC Consolidator and ERC Advanced grant funding.