Bronwyn Lucas PhD

Bronwyn Lucas is an Assistant Professor of Biochemistry, Biophysics, and Structural Biology in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology and the Center for Computational Biology at the University of California Berkeley and a Faculty Biophysicist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

The Lucas Lab uses and develops new cryo-EM image analysis methods to leverage the growing databases of structural models to locate and characterize molecular structures inside cells, with the goal of uncovering the molecular organization of biochemical pathways.

Bronwyn originally heralds from Australia where she did her undergraduate and Honours research in Molecular Biology at the University of Adelaide. She moved to the USA for her PhD in Molecular Biology at the University of Rochester studying the regulation of mRNA localization and turnover by RNA-binding proteins with Lynne Maquat. As a postdoc with Nikolaus Grigorieff at Janelia Research Campus and the University of Massachusetts Medical School, she pioneered the application of 2D Template Matching, a new approach to visualize and characterize macromolecular structure directly in the cell using cryo-EM. Now, in her own lab, she is synthesizing these two areas to develop new tools combining cryo-EM, bioinformatics, and computer vision techniques to visualize RNA-protein complex assembly directly in cells.