During her post-doctoral work in the laboratory of Ken Downing at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Eva Nogales was the first to determine the atomic structure of tubulin and the location of the taxol-binding site by electron crystallography.Nogales, E., Wolf, S. G. and Downing, K. H. (1998.) Structure of the ab tubulin dimer by electron crystallography. Nature, 391, 199-203. She became an assistant professor in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley in 1998. In 2000 she became an investigator in the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. As cryo-EM techniques became more powerful, she became a leader in applying cryo-EM to the study of microtubule structure and function and other large macromolecular assemblies such as eukaryotic transcription and translation initiation complexes,Michael A. Cianfrocco, George A. Kassavetis, Patricia Grob, Jie Fang, Tamar Juven-Gershon, James T. Kadonaga, Eva Nogales (2013.) Human TFIID Binds to Core Promoter DNA in a Reorganized Structural State. Cell, 152(1):120–131. the polycomb complex PRC2, and telomerase.
