Scientific Programmes
Structural Biology and Biocomputing Programme
Macromolecular Crystallography Group
Guillermo Montoya Last update May/2010
Guillermo Montoya was born in Madrid in 1967 and obtained his Bachelor degree in Biochemistry from the Universidad del País Vasco in 1990, and his PhD in Chemistry from the Universidad de Zaragoza in 1993.
He obtained both a European Molecular Biology Organisation (EMBO) and Federation of European Biochemical Societies (FEBS) Fellowship and moved to the Max Planck Institut für Biophysik in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, where he worked on membrane protein crystallisation in the Group of the Nobel laureate H. Michel.
Montoya later obtained a Marie Curie Fellowship and spent nine years at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), Heidelberg, Germany, working in I. Sinning’s Group where he focused on the crystallisation of the cytocrome bc1 membrane protein complex and later pioneered the study of the structure of the signal recognition particle (SRP), an essential ribonucleoprotein complex involved in protein targeting.
In 1998 he was appointed as Researcher at the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC) and was awarded a Peter und Traudl Engelhorn Foundation Research Fellowship. Since 2003 he has been an Honorary Professor in Biochemistry at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and Member of the working group in charge of the design of the biocrystallography beamline at the Spanish Synchrotron.
Montoya has been Head of the CNIO’s Macromolecular Crystallography Group since February 2002 and was acting Director of the Structural Biology and Biocomputing Programme from November 2003 to January 2006. During this year he has been awarded with the National Prizes from the Fundación Mutua Madrileña and Caja Rural de Granada, Ministerio de Sanidad.
