Eva Nogales, a professor of biochemistry, biophysics, and structural biology at the University of California, Berkeley and senior faculty scientist in Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Biosciences Area, has won the 2023 Shaw Prize in Life Science and Medicine.
The Shaw Prize is dedicated to furthering societal progress, enhancing the quality of life, and enriching humanity’s spiritual civilization. It was established under the auspices of entertainment producer and philanthropist Run Run Shaw in November 2002 and is managed and administered by The Shaw Prize Foundation based in Hong Kong. The prize is granted annually in the fields of astronomy, medicine, and life sciences, and mathematical sciences.
Dr. Nogales, who is sharing the Life Science and Medicine Prize with Patrick Cramer, director of the department of molecular biology at the Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences in Germany, is being honored for pioneering structural biology that enabled visualization, at the level of individual atoms, of the protein machines responsible for gene transcription, one of life’s fundamental processes.
The Shaw Prize acknowledgment states that Nogales and Cramer revealed the mechanism underlying each step in gene transcription, how proper gene transcription promotes health, and how dysregulation causes disease. Nogales was singled out for pioneering cryo-electron microscopy to transform the understanding of the earliest steps in gene transcription.
Professor Nogales is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a member of the National Academy of Science and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is a graduate of the Autonomous University of Madrid and holds a Ph.D. from the University of Keele in England.