Susan Marqusee

Susan Marqusee is Director of QB3-Berkeley, part of the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences, and the Eveland Warren Professor of Biochemistry, Biophysics and Structural Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. Marqusee has devoted her career to examining the structure and dynamics of amino acids. She is searching for answers to questions such as: "Why do so many proteins share the same native structures and serve different functions?" and "How do their non-native states contribute to deadly diseases?” Marqusee's extensive thermodynamic and kinetic studies use hydrogen-exchange, nuclear magnetic resonance, and single-molecule methods to study protein structure and behavior at increasingly sharper resolution. Her work has convincingly revealed that proteins are composed of cooperative native-like foldon units and demonstrated their key role in protein-folding pathways. She has also introduced a new tool, pulse proteolysis, for measuring protein stability and protein-protein binding affinity on a high-throughput scale. Marqusee's work has had a significant impact on many areas of research, ranging from the physical chemistry of macromolecules and protein folding to the design of therapeutics that prevent the aggregation of proteins which lead to common diseases such as Alzheimer's. She is a former governing Council member of the Protein Society. Marqusee has received numerous awards for her work, including_ the William C. Rose Award from the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. She has authored more than 100 peer-reviewed scientific articles that include prominent publications in Nature, Science, and PNAS. and she is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Biophysical Society in addition to her American Academy of Arts and Sciences membership.