When Eva Nogales was offered the possibility of doctoral research in England, she was attending a conference, her suitcase already packed. Asked how soon she could come, she replied, “I could go right now.”
She had grown up in Spain, where her parents had left school young to help support their families. They were determined that their children would have the education they had missed. Encouraged by exceptional teachers, Eva studied physics, then found her way into biology through a fascination with how proteins assemble themselves.
I first photographed her in 2023 at Stanley Hall in Berkeley, in her office and laboratory. We talked about the advances in imaging that had allowed scientists to see molecular structures once beyond reach. Eva spoke with the excitement of someone who had helped make those advances happen and could see how much remained to discover. Afterward, she sent me chocolates as a thank you, a kindness I remember.
In 1998, working with Kenneth Downing and Sharon Wolf at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, she helped reveal the structure of tubulin. This protein assembles into microtubules, hollow tubes that carry traffic through cells and help separate chromosomes when cells divide.
Microtubules continually grow and shorten. Their changing structure is essential to their work. The cancer drug Taxol disrupts that behavior by stabilizing them. The team’s structure revealed where the drug binds, helping explain its action in molecular detail.
Eva went on to become a leading practitioner of cryo-electron microscopy. Molecules are preserved in a thin layer of rapidly frozen water, then imaged with electrons. Computers combine many views into a three-dimensional reconstruction. Images of molecules caught in different shapes offer clues to how they move and function.
Her laboratory used this approach to study how cells begin reading genes. A flexible assembly of proteins called TFIID helps recognize the starting region on DNA and position the machinery that makes an RNA copy. Eva’s team revealed how its parts rearrange to do that work. A process described in textbooks became something scientists could examine in detail.
We made photographs together again in my library in 2025. Eva arrived with fabulous outfits, bringing her own style to the session. I had come to admire her science; spending time with her gave me an equal appreciation for her warmth and generosity.
I think of that young physicist, ready to leave for England with the suitcase she already had. Decades of discovery seemed only to have made her more eager for what she might see next.
