Karolin Luger is the Jennie Smoly Caruthers Endowed Chair of Biochemistry at the University of Colorado in Boulder, and an Investigator for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. She is a biochemist and structural biologist recognized for her work on chromatin structure and function. Luger was a key player in efforts to elucidate the three-dimensional structure of the nucleosome, the basic repeating unit in chromatin. Her lab’s current work focuses on how nucleosomes are recognized, assembled, and remodeled, and how nucleosome dynamics affect gene expression. The group also studies the structure and function of histone-based chromatin in non-eukaryotic organism, to gain insight into the evolutionary origin of the nucleosome.
Luger was born in Austria and graduated with a degree in Biochemistry from the University of Innsbruck, Austria. She obtained her Ph.D. in protein engineering and biophysics at the Biocenter in Basel, then moved to a postdoc at the ETH Zuerich in 1990. She started her independent career at Colorado State University in Fort Collins in 1999, where she continued her work on nucleosome and chromatin structure. In 2015, she 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 of EMBO.