Angela Gronenborn

Angela Gronenborn FRSC is the head of the Department of Structural Biology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and the holder of the UPMC Rosalind Franklin Chair. She specializes in the use of NMR spectroscopy to study proteins and macromolecular complexes. Her work has focused on the study of proteins involved in human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) replication and she directs the Pittsburgh Center for HIV Protein Interactions.

A native of Cologne, Germany, Gronenborn received her undergraduate degree in 1975 and her Ph.D. in physical chemistry in 1978, both from the University of Cologne. During her graduate work she became interested in the then-young field of nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy applied to biological macromolecules. She did postdoctoral work with protein NMR pioneer James Feeney at the National Institute for Medical Research in London, where she met fellow spectroscopist and longtime collaborator Marius Clore.

Gronenborn and Clore moved in 1984 to the Max Planck Institute and in 1988 to the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, part of the United States National Institutes of Health, to which they were recruited in part to assist efforts in studying HIV and HIV-related proteins. Gronenborn and Clore, along with Ad Bax and Dennis Torchia, made significant advances in three-dimensional protein NMR during this period.