Kathleen Collins

Biosketch

Kathleen Collins is a biochemist also using biophysical, molecular, and cellular approaches to understand macromolecular dynamics in eukaryotic cells. She is recognized for her work defining, reconstituting, and determining structural architectures of telomerase subunits and holoenzymes from the ciliate Tetrahymena and human cells. She is also known for discovering new biology about non-coding RNAs. Later in her career with funding from an NIH Director’s Pioneer Award, she launched an investigation of non-long-terminal-repeat (non-LTR) retrotransposons in humans and other animals that enabled an innovative strategy for site-specific safe-harbor human genome supplementation termed Precise RNA-mediated Insertion of Transgenes or PRINT. Collins was born in New Haven, Connecticut and raised across several states and countries. She graduated from Yale University in 1987 with a combined B.S. and M.S. degree in Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry, and from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1992 with a Ph.D. in Biology. After postdoctoral studies at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory with Carol Greider, she joined the faculty of University of California at Berkeley in 1995. Collins served as Division Head for Biochemistry, Biophysics & Structural Biology, and was awarded the ASBMB Earl and Thressa Stadtman Distinguished Scientist Award in 2021. She was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2000 and NAS in 2025.

Research Interests

Kathleen Collins’ laboratory has delved into the biochemical and cellular mechanisms that underlie function of polymerases beyond the central dogma. Her group elucidated principles of telomerase biogenesis, action, and regulation. Their studies of human telomerase made the first link between telomerase deficiency and inherited human disease, established disease-linked loss-of-function mechanisms, and instigated the use of telomere length as a diagnostic and guide for therapy in patients with bone marrow failure, aplastic anemia, pulmonary fibrosis, liver cirrhosis, and other tissue proliferative deficiencies. Her group also discovered the stress-induced cleavage of tRNAs now recognized to be general eukaryotic biology, and the strand-specific loading of Piwi proteins with small RNA by physical and functional coupling of RNA-dependent RNA polymerases and Dicer. Recent efforts focus on biochemistry, biology, and biotechnology from site-specific non-LTR retrotransposons, especially the encoded reverse transcriptases that support new gene synthesis into the genome. This class of proteins was adapted for a method of site-specific safe-harbor autonomous transgene supplementation of the human genome by RNA-only delivery.