Donald’s early research was in the field of robotic motion planning and distributed manipulation. Later he has made numerous contributions to MEMS and Micro-robotics, and designed MEMS micro-robots with dimensions of 60 µm by 250 µm by 10 µm.
Recently, he has conducted research in the areas of Structural Molecular Biology; chiefly, Protein Design and Protein Structure Determination from NMR data. He has developed numerous algorithms for protein design which have been successfully tested experimentally in the wet lab.  The protein design algorithms attempt to incorporate additional molecular flexibility into the design process by using ensembles and continuously flexible rotamers and backbones. Donald has also developed algorithms for determining the structures of biomedically significant proteins. For example, his subgroup algorithm CRANS (Acta Crystallogr. D 2004; J. Biol. Chem. 2003), which identifies cross-rotation peaks consistent with non-crystallographic symmetry, was used in the structure determination of the enzyme dihydrofolate reductase-thymidylate synthase (DHFR-TS) from Cryptosporidium hominis, an important advancement in Cryptosporidium biology. He has designed many algorithms and computational protocols to extract structural information from NMR data, and used that information to compute structures of globular proteins and symmetric homo-oligomers. A distinct feature of his algorithms is that they use less data, and provide complexity-theoretic guarantees on time and space (See, e.g., B. R. Donald and J. Martin. "Automated NMR Assignment and Protein Structure Determination using Sparse Dipolar Coupling Constraints." Progress in NMR Spectroscopy 2009; 55(2):101-127). Donald is the author of [https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/algorithms-structural-molecular-biology Algorithms in Structural Molecular Biology], a textbook published by MIT Press (2011).