Catherine H Freudenreich

Catherine Freudenreich is an American molecular biologist at Tufts University. From 2019-2025, Freudenreich served as chair of the Department of Biology.

Life and career Freudenreich spent her childhood in Los Alamos, New Mexico, before attending Rice University, where she graduated in 1988 with a B.A in biology. She received her PhD in 1994 from Duke University, where she studied inhibitor binding sites of Type II topoisomerases in the lab of Kenneth Kreuzer, and continued to do so as a postdoctoral researcher in the same lab. Freudenreich then undertook further postdoctoral research at Princeton University with Virginia Zakian, studying CTG repeated sequences in the yeast genome. Recently, Freudenreich’s group looked at CAG/CTG repeats in Huntington’s disease, finding that the cells’ attempts to repair CAG sequences often lead to large, deleterious deletions.

Freudenreich has also studied how DNA repeat sequences contribute to DNA structures that can cause DNA breaks, and how the cell protects against genomic damage from these mechanisms.

Selected publications

Freudenreich, Catherine H.; Kantrow, Sara M.; Zakian, Virginia A. (1998-02-06). "Expansion and Length-Dependent Fragility of CTG Repeats in Yeast". Science. 279 (5352): 853–856. doi:10.1126/science.279.5352.853. ISSN 0036-8075. House, Nealia C.M.; Yang, Jiahui H.; Walsh, Stephen C.; Moy, Jonathan M.; Freudenreich, Catherine H. (2014-09-18). "NuA4 Initiates Dynamic Histone H4 Acetylation to Promote High-Fidelity Sister Chromatid Recombination at Postreplication Gaps". Molecular Cell. 55 (6): 818–828. doi:10.1016/j.molcel.2014.07.007. ISSN 1097-2765. PMC 4169719. PMID 25132173. Su, Xiaofeng A.; Freudenreich, Catherine H. (2017-10-03). "Cytosine deamination and base excision repair cause R-loop–induced CAG repeat fragility and instability in Saccharomyces cerevisiae". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 114 (40). doi:10.1073/pnas.1711283114. ISSN 0027-8424. PMC 5635916. PMID 28923949.

Awards and honors

FASEB summer conference "Dynamic DNA Structures in Biology" (Chair, 2018; Co-chair, 2016) NIH MG panel (2018) NIH MGB panel (2017) Genetics Society of America (member) American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (member)