Bonnie Murphy, Max Planck Institute of Biophysics, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, has been awarded the Clara Immerwahr Award for her outstanding achievements in catalysis research. The award was presented at a ceremony at the Technical University of Berlin (TU Berlin), Germany, on April 11, 2025.
The award recognizes outstanding research in the field of catalysis by an excellent young female scientist at an early stage of her career, i.e., as a postdoctoral fellow or junior researcher. It is presented by the Excellence Cluster “Unifying Systems in Catalysis” (UniSysCat) and sponsored by BASF SE. The prize comes with EUR 15,000 in financial support for a research stay at UniSysCat.
Bonnie Murphy’s research focuses on uncovering the structure and mechanisms of proteins—particularly those of bioenergetic relevance—using single-particle electron cryo-microscopy (cryo-EM) in combination with biochemical, molecular, and electrochemical techniques.
Bonnie Murphy, born in Edmonton, Canada, completed her B.Sc. Joint Honours in Biology and Chemistry at St. Francis Xavier University, Antigonish, Nova Scotia, Canada, and earned her Ph.D. in Inorganic Chemistry from the University of Oxford, UK, under the guidance of Professor Fraser Armstrong. In 2014, she worked as a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the same university, and in 2016, she joined the Max Planck Institute of Biophysics as a Postdoctoral Research Associate under the mentorship of Werner Kühlbrandt.
Since 2019, Dr. Murphy has led a Max Planck Research Group at the Max Planck Institute of Biophysics in Frankfurt.
Figure 1. Bonnie Murphy receives the Clara Immerwahr Award from Juri Rappsilber, Spokesperson of UniSysCat and Professor at TU Berlin (Photos © Mario Müller/Wiley).
Selected Publications
- Max Dongsheng Yin, Olivier N. Lemaire, José Guadalupe Rosas Jiménez, Mélissa Belhamri, Anna Shevchenko, Gerhard Hummer, Tristan Wagner, Bonnie J. Murphy, Conformational dynamics of a multienzyme complex in anaerobic carbon fixation, Science 2025, 387(6733), 498-504. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adr9672
- Ralf Steinhilper, Linda Boß, Sven-A. Freibert, Vinzent Schulz, Nils Krapoth, Susann Kaltwasser, Roland Lill, Bonnie J. Murphy, Two-stage binding of mitochondrial ferredoxin-2 to the core iron-sulfur cluster assembly complex, Nature Communications 2024. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-54585-4
- Olivia Pfeil-Gardiner, Higor Vinícius Dias Rosa, Dietmar Riedel, Yu Seby Chen, Dominique Lörks, Pirmin Kükelhan, Martin Linck, Heiko Müller, Filip Van Petegem, Bonnie J. Murphy, Elemental mapping in single-particle reconstructions by reconstructed electron energy-loss analysis, Nature Methods 2024. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41592-024-02482-5
- Vinzent Schulz, Ralf Steinhilper, Jonathan Oltmanns, Sven-A. Freibert, Nils Krapoth, Uwe Linne, Sonja Welsch, Maren H. Hoock, Volker Schünemann, Bonnie J. Murphy, Roland Lill, Mechanism and structural dynamics of sulfur transfer during de novo [2Fe-2S] cluster assembly on ISCU2, Nature Communications 2024. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-47310-8
- Iram Aziz, Kanwal Kayastha, Susann Kaltwasser, Janet Vonck, Sonja Welsch, Bonnie J. Murphy, Jörg Kahnt, Di Wu, Tristan Wagner, Seigo Shima, Ulrich Ermler, Structural and mechanistic basis of the central energy-converting methyltransferase complex of methanogenesis, PNAS 2024. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2315568121
- Tomohiro Watanabe, Olivia Pfeil-Gardiner, Jörg Kahnt, Jürgen Koch, Seigo Shima, Bonnie J. Murphy, Three-megadalton complex of methanogenic electron-bifurcating and CO2-fixing enzymes, Science 2021. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abg5550
Also of Interest
