Wah Chiu is the Director of the National Center for Macromolecular Imaging, the Director for the Protein Folding Center, and the Codierctor of the W.M. Keck Center for Computational Biology at Baylor College of Medicine.

His research interests include determining the 3-dimenstional structures of biological nanomachines by electron cryomicroscopy and computer reconstruction and to relate the structures to their functional mechanisms. His structural technique complements to those of X ray crystallography and NMR spectroscopy. His lab is uniquely equipped with four intermediate voltage electron cryomicroscopes and supercomputers. His laboratory has pioneered various experimental and computational methods in biological cryo-EM. They have determined cryo-EM structures of biological bundle, ion channel, viruses and chaperonins at unprecedented resolutions. His group has recently achieved the capability of tracing Ca backbone of protein components in several large molecular nanomachines using single particle cryo-EM without the aid of crystallography. Many of their structural investigations have produced not only novel structural informatics but also insightful functional mechanisms on protein folding and virus infection respectively.

Dr. Chiu serves on multiple advisory boards, including the Protein Data Bank, Steering Committee for Alliance Nano Health, the Singapore Ministry of Education, the Swiss National Science Foundation, as well as many editorial boards, including J Microscopy & Microanalysis, J Microscopy, Structure, the Journal of Structural and Functional Genomics, and the Quarterly Reviews of Biophysics. He received his B.A. in Physics, Ph.D in Biophysics, and a Postdoctoral Associate from the University of California, Berkeley.