With a degree in Physics from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and a Ph.D. in Biophysics from the University of Keele in the United Kingdom, this Madrid native is a Professor of Biochemistry, Biophysics, and Structural Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. She is also a researcher at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and a senior scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Her interest is in defining the molecular basis of cellular activity by describing, using electron microscopy and computational imaging, the cellular components at atomic resolution. Her laboratory has imaged Taxol, an anticancer drug, bound to microtubules, polymers essential for cell division. She has also imaged the machinery in charge of reading the genes in the cell, or the one that silences part of the genome to define the identity of each cell in our body.

For her scientific work, she has received awards from scientific societies in the United States, including Microscopy, Biophysics, Cell Biology, Biochemistry, and Molecular Biology. He is an elected member of the U.S. National Academy of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the European Molecular Biology Organization, and the Royal Academy of Exact Sciences of Spain. In 2019, she received the Grimwade Medal from the University of Melbourne, in 2020 she was president of the American Society for Cell Biology, and in 2023 she received the Shaw Prize, known as the Asian Nobel, in the category of Life Sciences and Medicine.

Photo: ©Christopher Michel