Eva Nogales
University of California, Berkeley
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Primary Section: 29, Biophysics and Computational Biology Secondary Section: 21, Biochemistry Membership Type:
Member
(elected 2015)
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Biosketch
Born in Spain, Eva Nogales studied Physics in the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and carried her PhD work at the Synchrotron Radiation Source in the UK. She moved to the USA to do her postdoctoral studies with Ken Downing at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) where she was part of the team that solved the first structure of tubulin. In 1998 she joined the UC Berkeley faculty and since 2000 has been a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. Eva is presently a professor in the department of Molecular Cell Biology at UC Berkeley and a Senior faculty scientist at LBNL. Eva Nogales is the recipient of a number of awards, among them the Dorothy Hodgkin Award from the Protein Society and the Mildred Cohn Award from the American Society for Biochemistry, Molecular Biology and the Keith R. Porter Lecture Award from the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB), and the Grimwade Medal in Biochemistry by the University of Melbourne. She is a Fellow of the Biophysical Society and of ASCB, Member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and an Associate Member of EMBO.
Research Interests
The Nogales lab is dedicated to gaining mechanistic insight into two areas of eukaryotic biology: central dogma machinery in the control of gene expression, and cytoskeleton interactions and dynamics in cell division. Under those two broad themes, Eva Nogales studies the mechanistic principles that underlying microtubule dynamic instability and its regulation by cellular factor. She also studies the molecular machinery involved in transcription by the human RNA Polymerase II and the epigenetic complexes that result in gene silencing through the post-translational modification of chromatin. The unifying principle in Nogales work is the study of macromolecular assemblies as whole units of molecular function by direct visualization of their architecture, functional states, and regulatory interactions. To gain a molecular understanding of her systems of interest, her lab uses cryo-EM and image analysis as a major tool, as well as biochemical and biophysical assays.
