Presenter

Dr. Karissa Sanbonmatsu is a structural biologist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where she leads the Sanbonmatsu Laboratory established in 2001. She received her B.A. in Physics from Columbia University in 1992 and Ph.D. in Astrophysical, Planetary and Atmospheric Sciences from University of Colorado at Boulder in 1997. Her team uses computational and experimental approaches to understand the mechanism of a diverse array of epigenetic and non-coding RNA systems, including chromatin, ribosomes, riboswitches, and long non-coding RNAs. She has been a leading figure in structural studies of long non-coding RNAs in epigenetics and is currently studying the mechanism of epigenetic effects involving chromatin architecture. She set the record for the largest biomolecular simulation, at 2.64 million atoms in 2005, and again in 2019, at one billion atoms, publishing the first simulation of an entire gene. She is a fellow of the American Physical Society and an advocate for LGBT scientists. Her TED talk, "The Biology of Gender, from DNA to the Brain", has over 2.5 million views on TED.com.