Daniela Rhodes (Biology)
Daniela Rhodes |
 |
Daniela Rhodes went to infant school in Italy. At 11 years of age she emigrated with her parents to Sweden where she graduated with a Diploma in Engineering in 1969. That year she married Richard Rhodes and moved to Cambridge, where she obtained a position as research assistant at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology.
Only after the birth of her son James in 1976 did she decide to register for a PhD, which she obtained in 1982 from Cambridge University with Aaron Klug as supervisor. She continues to work at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology where she obtained tenure in 1987 and became Senior Scientist in 1990.
She gave the 1989 Women in Science Lecture at Brookhaven National Laboratory US, is Official Fellow of Chare Hall Cambridge, was elected EMBO member 1996 and was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 2007.
Daniela Rhodes has made many fundamental contributions to understanding the structure and function of nucleic acids and their biologically important interactions with many different proteins. Her work combines biochemical analyses with direct structural determination. She determined the structures of a number of important proteins and protein-DNA complexes involved in transcription, such as zinc-finger proteins and nuclear hormone receptors. She has provided some of the first structural information on telomeric proteins and their complexes. Throughout her career she has made many contributions to understanding chromatin structure and function. She was involved in determining the structure of the nucleosome core, has worked on transcriptionally active chromatin and more recently, the higher-order 30nm structure of chromatin.