Molecular biologist
Susan M. Gasser (born 1955) is a Swiss molecular biologist. From 2004 to 2019 she was the director of the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research in Basel, Switzerland, where she also led a research group from 2004 until 2021. She was in parallel professor of molecular biology at the University of Basel until April 2021. Since January 2021, Susan Gasser is director of the ISREC Foundation, which supports translational cancer research. She is also professor invité at the University of Lausanne in the department of fundamental microbiology. She is an expert in quantitative biology and studies epigenetic inheritance and genome stability.[1] Recipient of multiple swiss and European awards, she was named member of the US Academy of Sciences in 2022.
Early career
Susan Gasser received her doctorate from the University of Basel in biochemistry in 1982 at the Biozentrum of the University of Basel, after a BA at the University of Chicago with an honors thesis in biophysics (1979). For her PhD she developed an in vitro system for the import of mitochondrial proteins, demonstrating its energy-dependence and identifying compartment-specific processing pathways for protein import, advised by Gottfried (Jeff) Schatz. As a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Geneva with Ulrich K. Laemmli,[1][2] she established roles for topoisomerase II in metaphase chromosome structure (Gasser et al., JMB 1986) and for A/T-rich sequences in long-range chromatin folding (Gasser and Laemmli, Cell 1986). She established her own laboratory at the ISREC Swiss Institute for Experimental Cancer Research in Epalinges in 1986.
Career
Gasser led a research group at the Swiss Institute for Experimental Cancer Research in Epalinges sur Lausanne until 2001. There she pioneered live fluorescence imaging of telomeres and repressed chromatin in budding yeast, coupled with biochemical and genetic approaches to understand chromosome structure and nuclear organization. She was named professor of molecular biology at the University of Geneva in 2001, prior to moving to lead the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research in Basel, as its director, in 2004. At the FMI she led a research group studying the spatial organization of double-strand break repair and checkpoint activation in budding yeast, and established and exploited means to study the spatial organization and genetic control of heterochromatin in C. elegans. From 2005 - 2021 she also held the position of full professor at the University of Basel. Since February 2021, she is the director of the ISREC Foundation, which built and maintains the new Agora institute of translational cancer research in Lausanne, Switzerland. Susan Gasser also holds the position of guest professor at the University of Lausanne.
Initially studying chromatin organization in budding yeast, her laboratory combined genetic, biochemical and fluorescence microscopy approaches, developing quantitative live imaging tools to study the subnuclear dynamics of DNA loci in living cells. Her work elucidated roles of histone modifications and turnover in genome stability and in the spatial organization of chromatin in the interphase nucleus, with an emphasis on the function of subnuclear compartments both in yeast, and in C. elegans during tissue differentiation.
Gasser has served on review boards and advisory councils throughout Switzerland, Europe.[1][2][3] and Japan, and is currently chair of the strategic advisory board of the Helmholtz Society Health Program of Germany. She serves on the ETH board (Rat der Eidgenossosichen Technischen Hochschulen) and the Swiss Science Council. She served on the Gairdner Foundation Medical Prize committee, the EMBL Science Advisory Council (SAC), and numerous foundation boards in Switzerland. She was vice chairperson and then chairperson of the EMBO Council (2000-2004) and a member of the President's Science and Technology Advisory Council (PSTAC; 2012-2014) for the European Commission. Susan led the Gender Committee of the Swiss National Science Foundation from 2014- 2019, and initiated the PRIMA program for the promotion of women in academia, actively promoting the careers of women scientists in Switzerland. In Japan, she co-founded the Women in Science Japan organization. Susan Gasser was elected to the National Academy of Science (US), the Académie de France, Leopoldina, EMBO, AAAS, as well as the Swiss Academy of Medical Sciences, and received the INSERM International Prize in 2011, the FEBS | EMBO Women in Science Award in 2012, the Weizmann Institute Women in Science award, the Otto Naegeli prize in medical research (2006). She holds honorary doctorates from the University of Lausanne, the University of Fribourg, the University of Geneva and the Charles University in Prague. In Switzerland she was also recipient of the Friedrich Miescher Award (1991(, the National Latsis Prize (1992), the Otto Naegeli Prize in Medical Sciences (2006) and the Lelio Orci Award (2023).
She has published over 300 articles and reviews in leading journals (see Google Scholar entry) and serves on editorial boards of Molecular Cell, Genes & Development among other journals.
