Susan M. Gasser

Susan M. Gasser is a professor of molecular biology at the University of Basel. From 2004 - 2019 she was the director of Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research, where she currently runs a laboratory of quantitative biology studying epigenetic inheritance and genome stability.
Early career.
Susan Gasser received her doctorate from the University of Basel in Biochemistry for the development of an in vitro system for the import of mitochondrial proteins with Gottfried (Jeff) Schatz in the Biozentrum of the University of Basel. She then studied the long-range folding of the genome in flies and human cells as a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Geneva with Ulrich K. Laemmli . She established a role for topoisomerase II in metaphase chromosome structure (Gasser et al., JMB 1986) and identified a role for A/T-rich sequences in long-range chromatin folding.
Career.
Gasser presently holds a professorship at the University of Basel and runs a research laboratory at the FMI. From 1986 to 2001, Gasser led a research group at the Swiss Institute for Experimental Cancer Research. There she discovered and documented the clustering of yeast telomeres at the nuclear envelope, and elucidated the role of this subnuclear distribution in heritable gene repression using a combined genetic and fluorescence microscopy approach. From 2001 to 2004, Gasser was a professor of Molecular Biology at the University of Geneva. The laboratory developed quantitative live imaging tools to study the subnuclear dynamics of DNA loci in living cells. From 2004 - 2019, she was the Director of the Friedrich Miescher Institute in Basel, and Professor of Molecular Biology at the University of Basel. She has been a pioneer in characterizing the role histone modifications in the spatial organization of chromatin in the interphase nucleus. Gasser has served on review boards and advisory councils throughout Switzerland and Europe. She is currently a member of the Swiss Science Council and the Board of the ETH Domain (Rat der Eidgenossosichen Technischen Hochschulen) and Chaired the Commission on Gender Equality of the Swiss National Science Foundation from 2014-2020. She was previously Chair of the EMBO Council (2002 - 2005) and member of the President's Science and Technology Advisory Council (PSTAC) for the European Commission.