MVP Kevin Bernhagen

In 2002, Kevin Bernhagen realized that his powerful G4 mac was just sitting idle most of the time. That seemed like a shame, so he went looking for productive work for it to do.

His search led him to Folding@home. The idea of contributing to science was appealing, especially since Folding@home was actively working on diseases like cancer and Parkinson's that afflicted some of his extended family.

When Apple released their first multi-core machines, Kevin saw an opportunity to get more folding done. He wrote scripts to coordinate running one instance of Folding@home on each core and shared his code. That helped get Kevin on our radar.

In 2012, when we were working on a new version of the client software (that was v7!), Kevin was a natural person to enlist to help with apple compatibility.

Kevin has been helping with apple compatibility since then. It’s not easy for us to keep up with all the major operating systems, so it’s a huge help to have experts like Kevin pitch in on the systems they know best. 

When asked why he keeps volunteering, Kevin says it’s one of the more meaningful things he does. Over the years more friends and family have been diagnosed with diseases that Folding@home works on, like Alzheimer’s and COVID. He’s glad to pitch in, both by contributing his own compute capacity and by helping make it easier for others to contribute too.

So a big thanks to Kevin!

And, as always, thanks to all of our volunteers.