Nicholas Hud was born in Los Angeles, California. He received his B.S. degree from Loyola Marymount University. His Ph.D. was conferred by the University of California, Davis for physical investigations of DNA condensation by protamine. He was a postdoctoral fellow in the Biology and Biotechnology Research Program at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory with Prof. Rod Balhorn. He was an NIH postdoctoral fellow in biophysics at UCLA with Prof. Juli Feigon and Prof. Frank Anet where he used NMR spectroscopy to study DNA-cation interactions. Prof. Hud joined the faculty of the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Georgia Tech in 1999. He currently serves as the Director of the NSF/NASA Center for Chemical Evolution (CCE), and the Associate Director of the Parker H. Petit Institute of Bioengineering and Bioscience (IBB). He is a member of the NASA Center for Ribosomal Origins and Evolution (Ribo Evo), and is the former Chair of the Biochemistry Division in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry. Prof. Hud is also part of the Georgia Tech Center for Drug Design, Development, and Delivery (CD4) as well as the Center for Nanobiology of the Macromolecular Assembly Disorders (NanoMAD). Prof. Hud has been Visiting Professor of Chemistry at the National NMR Center in Ljubljana, Slovenia, in the Department of Chemistry at Imperial College London and with the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) and the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB) in Barcelona, Spain.
The research in my laboratory is directed towards elucidating the fundamental chemical and physical principles that govern nucleic acid (RNA and DNA) assembly. We are interested in how the physical properties of nucleic acids govern biological functions in contemporary life, and how these same properties provide clues to the origin and early evolution of life. We are also applying our knowledge of nucleic acids to problems that are of current importance in medicine and biotechnology. Specific projects include investigations of: 1) the origin and evolution of RNA; 2) cation, solvent and small molecule interactions with nucleic acids; 3) nucleic acid condensation and packaging; and 4) folding and evolution of the ribosome. Our research involves the application of a wide variety of physical and chemical techniques.