Günter Blobel is a Professor at the Rockefeller University and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He received an MD from the University of Tübingen in Germany and a PhD from the University of Wisconsin in Madison. After postdoctoral training with George Palade, he joined the faculty of the Rockefeller University.

Research in Blobel’s laboratory has focused on protein traffic across intracellular membranes. More recently, his laboratory has focused on solving the atomic structure of individual nucleoporins or nucleoporin sub-complexes with the goal to assemble nuclear pore complexes from components, to analyze them by cryo-electron microscopy and to fit in the obtained atomic structures. His laboratory has also worked on integral membrane protein complexes in the nuclear envelope that connect cytoskeletal elements on the cytoplasmic side to heterochromatin on the nucleoplasmic side. These junctions are thought to randomly generate zones of compression and decompression in the nuclear interior and thereby facilitating the huge conformational changes of chromatins required for transcription, DNA replication and repair.

Dr. Blobel received numerous awards, among them the 1999 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine.