ELENA CONTI

2024 NOMIS Awardee

ELENA CONTI

2024 NOMIS Awardee

Director of the Department of Structural Cell Biology at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry, Munich, Germany

Born in Italy, Elena Conti earned a degree in chemistry at the University of Pavia (Italy) and her PhD from the Faculty of Physical Sciences at Imperial College London (UK). She then completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Rockefeller University (New York, US) before establishing her own research group at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (Heidelberg, Germany). Upon joining the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in 2007, Conti assumed the role of the institute’s first female director and organized the infrastructure to facilitate structural biology research on campus.

Conti and her research group have determined the structures and mechanisms of approximately 100 macromolecular proteins and complexes, ranging in complexity from lower to higher eukaryotes. She has illuminated the assembly of “productive” complexes on mRNAs, such as the exon junction complex and the polyA tail ribonucleoprotein complex, and of “destructive” complexes that act to degrade mRNAs. Conti’s research represents a major breakthrough in the field, as a paradigm for the direct coordination of distinct macromolecular machines in gene expression.