Catherine Royer has joined Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute as a chair of the school's biocomputation and bioinformatics department, and as a professor in the biology department. She will begin her new roles there this month.
Royer, a molecular biophysicist, is currently director of the Center for Structural Biochemistry in Montpellier, France, a position she has held since 2007. Before that, she was a visiting director of research at the center. Her research focuses on the physical mechanisms through which biological molecules work. She is particularly interested in the mechanisms at play as DNA is transcribed into messenger RNA – with special attention to a group of transcription factors called nuclear receptors – and in the folding of proteins that have been synthesized by the ribosome.
She earned her doctorate in biochemistry at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and received a license in biochemistry and a general academic studies degree in natural sciences from the Pierre and Marie Curie University.