Speaker Profile
Susan Margaret Gasser

Susan Margaret Gasser BA, PhD

Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics, Molecular Biology
Basel, Basel-Stadt, Switzerland

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Susan M. Gasser is the director of the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research, a position she assumed in 2004. In parallel, she holds a professorship at the University of Basel and runs an active research laboratory at the FMI. Prior to joining the FMI, she was a professor in the Department of Molecular Biology at the University of Geneva.

Susan studied at the University of Chicago and completed her PhD at the University of Basel (Biochemistry; G. Schatz), working on the import of mitochondrial proteins. As a postdoctoral fellow, she studied the long-range folding of the genome in flies and human cells. She identified topoisomerase II as a structural component of mitotic chromosomes, and AT-rich sequences as elements of loop organization. From 1986-2001, as a research group leader at the Swiss Institute for Experimental Cancer Research, she combined genetic approaches and fluorescence microscopy to examine the impact of nuclear organization on genome function – specifically on heritable gene repression in yeast.
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