Nicolas Fawzi

Nicolas Fawzi’s research centers on increasing understanding of the structure, interactions, regulation, and function of a class of RNA processing assemblies whose dysfunction has implications for several neurodegenerative diseases. He is an Associate Professor of Medical Science in the Department of Molecular Pharmacology, Physiology, and Biotechnology and the Robert J and Nancy D Carney Institute for Brain Science at Brown University. He has achieved success in visualizing the structural detail of disordered protein phrase separation - previously, understanding the physiology of membrane-less organelles and their pathological dysfunction associated with cancer, ALS, and frontotemporal dementia was hampered by the inability to see these poorly understood proteins with atomic resolution. Fawzi received a National Science Foundation CAREER award in 2019. He completed a Ph.D. with Teresa Head-Gordon at University of California, Berkeley, using molecular simulation to study protein folding and aggregation before postdoctoral work with Marius Clore at NIH developing NMR spectroscopy tools to observe protein interactions and aggregation with atomic resolution.