Dr. Eva Nogales is a biophysicist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory , is a U.S. Department of Energy national laboratory conducting unclassified scientific research. It is located on the grounds of the University of California, Berkeley, in the Berkeley Hills above the central campus...

. She is a Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of California, Berkeley and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute

Howard Hughes Medical Institute

Howard Hughes Medical Institute is a United States non-profit medical research organization based in Chevy Chase, Maryland. It was founded by the American businessman Howard Hughes in 1953. It is one of the largest private funding organizations for biological and medical research in the United...

 investigator.

Eva Nogales works on structural and functional characterization of macromolecular complexes. Her lab uses electron microscopy, computational image analysis as well as functional biochemical assays to gain insights into function and regulation of the large biological assemblies.

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Biography

Eva Nogales obtained her BS degree in physics from the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, Spain in 1988. She earned her PhD from the University of Keele, U.K. in 1992 while working at the Synchrotron Radiation Source under the supervision of Joan Bordas.

During her post-doctoral work in the Ken Downing lab, Eva Nogales was the first to determine the atomic structure of tubulin

Tubulin

Tubulin is one of several members of a small family of globular proteins. The most common members of the tubulin family are α-tubulin and β-tubulin, the proteins that make up microtubules. Each has a molecular weight of approximately 55 kiloDaltons. Microtubules are assembled from dimers of α- and...

 by electron crystallography. She now continues to study microtubule

Microtubule

Microtubules are a component of the cytoskeleton. These rope-like polymers of tubulin can grow as long as 25 micrometers and are highly dynamic. The outer diameter of microtubule is about 25 nm. Microtubules are important for maintaining cell structure, providing platforms for intracellular...

dynamics in her own laboratory. In addition to microtubules, Dr. Nogales explores the structural and functional aspects of large macromolecular assemblies such as eukaryotic transcription and translation initiation complexes.

Awards and honors

Dr. Nogales is a recipient of several awards including Early Career Award by the American Society for Cell Biology (2005), and the Chabot Science Award for Excellence (2006).

Personal information

Eva Nogales is married to Howard Padmore and they have two children.