Monika Fuxreiter received her M.Sc. and PhD degrees from the Eötvös Loránd University of Sciences, Hungary. She was a postdoctoral fellow with the 2013 Chemistry Nobel prize winner Arieh Warshel at University of Southern California, Los Angeles, where she was working on QM/MM simulations of enzymatic catalysis. She was a senior scientist in the Institute of Enzymology, Hungarian Academy of Sciences and now she is the head of Laboratory of Protein Dynamics at University of Debrecen, Hungary.
In the last 10 years Monika Fuxreiter has been working on the field of intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs). She developed various models to describe how ID proteins recognize their partners. She showed that the unbound state of ID proteins is biased for their bound state, serving as preformed elements. She established that ID regions often embed short linear motifs (SLiMs), which mediate protein-protein interactions. She demonstrated that not all ID proteins fold upon binding, instead structural multiplicity could be a key element of the complex. These molecular associations are refereed to as ‘fuzzy’ protein complexes. She elaborated molecular mechanisms and regulatory features of fuzzy complexes, including their distinguished role in eukaryotic transcriptional machinery.
She is a mother of three children and a recipient of the L’Oral Unesco “Women for Science” award.