Dr. Gronenborn received her Diploma (1975) and Doctoral (1978) degrees in Chemistry from the University of Cologne, Germany. After post-doctoral work with Jim Feeney at The National Institute for Medical Research in Mill Hill, London, UK she was fortunate to continue research at NIMR in the Division of Physical Biochemistry. In 1984 she moved to the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Martinsried (Munich) as head of the biological NMR group. In 1988 she relocated to the Laboratory of Chemical Physics in NIDDK at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, where together with Bax and Clore she was instrumental in developing NMR methodologies for biological macromolecules. Since 2004 she is a Professor at the University of Pittsburgh Medical School where she currently holds the UPMC Rosalind Franklin Chair in Structural Biology. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2007.
Key contributions include the development of restrained molecular dynamics/ simulated annealing algorithms and multidimensional, heteronuclear spectroscopic methods, which allowed the extension of conventional NMR methods to higher molecular weight systems. Gronenborn has solved solution structures of a large number of medically and biologically important proteins, including cytokines and chemokines, transcription factors and their complexes and various HIV and AIDS related proteins. Her extensive bibliography contains more than 350 articles and numerous book chapters.