Nenad Ban is a biochemist born in Zagreb, Croatia who currently works at the ETH Zurich, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, as a professor of Structural Molecular Biology.

Already in high school he developed an interest in understanding the mechanisms of protein synthesis, which led him to the laboratory of Prof. Zeljko Kucan and Ivana Weygand in Zagreb where he investigated tRNA synthetases, enzymes that charge tRNAs with amino acids to prepare them as substrates for protein synthesis on the ribosome.

These interests brought him to the Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale University where he determined the atomic structure of the large ribosomal subunit by X-ray crystallography, as part of the group in the laboratory of Thomas A. Steitz.

[8][9][10][11] Nenad Ban’s group at ETH Zurich revealed the mechanisms behind the key steps in eukaryotic cytoplasmic and mitochondrial translation with a broad impact on a wide range of fields in biology, chemistry and biomedicine.

[12][13] His group also contributed to our understanding of giant multifunctional enzymes involved in fatty acid synthesis offering mechanistic insights into substrate shuttling and delivery in such megasynthases.