Karolin Luger

University of Colorado, United States of America

Karolin Luger is the Jennie Smoly Caruthers Endowed Chair of Biochemistry at the University of Colorado, and an HHMI Investigator. She is recognized for her work on nucleosome structure and interacting proteins. The lab also studies the DNA damage recognition protein PARP1 and its interactions with chromatin, with the aim of developing novel PARP inhibitors for cancer therapy. The group also studies histone-based DNA organization in non-eukaryotic organisms, to gain insight into the evolutionary origin of the nucleosome.

Luger was born in Austria and obtained a degree in Biochemistry from the University of Innsbruck. She obtained her Ph.D. in biophysics from the Biocenter Basel, then moved to a postdoc at the ETH Zuerich in 1990. She started her independent career at Colorado State University in 1999, and in 2015 moved to the University of Colorado at Boulder. She is a fellow of the Biophysical Society, a member of the National Academy of Science; the American Academy of Arts and Science; and EMBO.