4 Career Connection – Structural Chemist
hmnelson
Structural Chemist
Figure 1. A photo of Dr. Nogales with one of the machines in her lab at the University of California, Berkeley.
Dr. Eva Nogales is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, Senior Faculty Scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Professor of Biochemistry, Molecular Biology, and Structural Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Nogales received her PhD in Biophysics at Keele University in the United Kingdom under Dr. Joan Bordas.
Nogales’s current work at the University of California is dedicated to gaining mechanistic insight into eukaryotic biology – the central dogma of replication machinery and cytoskeleton interactions and dynamics in cellular division.Currently, Dr. Nogales and her students are investigating the complex interactions between microtubules, epigenetic regulation, and transcriptional mechanisms. The lab specializes in cryo-electron microscopy and biochemical and biophysical assays inorder to explore these subjects.
Within her lab’s investigations into microtubules, Dr. Nogales is exploring their associated proteins, the kinetochore interface, and the structural basis of their instability. Microtubules play a pivotal role in several cell processes – cell division, intracellular transport, and structural integrity of cells. Gaining insight into how microtubules function and change can unveil the intricacies of the fundamental biological mechanisms and development of therapeutic treatments for diseases such as cancer (where microtubules are often the subject of drug targeting).
Care to learn more? Visit the professors website here to read more about her current explorations, or perhaps, be a part of them.
