Biography - Catherine L. Drennan

Cathy Drennan studies metalloenzymes, and her goal is to visualize the mechanistic steps that catalyze the reactions. Her research has been widely recognized by the National Academy of Sciences, the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Protein Society, and the American Crystallographic Association.

As a child, Drennan struggled with dyslexia. In her inspiring TED talk “Being differently abled is my superpower,” she describes how shape recognition helped her learn to read and now enables her to interpret electron density maps. She also coauthored “What Every Teacher and Mentor Should Know: A Guide to Identifying and Reducing Stereotype Threat to Maximize Student Performance.”

At Vassar College, Drennan’s research advisor Miriam Rossi encouraged her to believe in herself. After graduating, she taught high school science and drama for three years. In graduate school at the University of Michigan, she studied vitamin B₁₂ interactions with enzymes with Martha Ludwig and Rowena Matthews. She did postdoctoral research at Caltech with Douglas Rees.

At MIT, with crucial funding from HHMI, she embarked on a project that seemed unlikely to succeed: determining the mechanism of the metalloprotein ribonuclease reductase (RNR). She described the results that she and her collaborators obtained in her 2024 Keynote Address at the ACA Annual Meeting. They determined the structure of the inactive form of the enzyme as well as the active form. The structure of the inactive form has significance for drug design. The structure of the active form is quite different from the previously proposed structure and the AlphaFold prediction, leading to a deeper understanding of the catalytic cycle.

Revealing the mechanism of RNR was a triumph for structural science, enabled by a combination of methods including X-ray crystallography, EM, cryo-EM, small-angle scattering, and protein modification, giving a result that couldn’t have been obtained in any other way. According to Drennan, these powerful techniques have delivered a Golden Age of structural science.