At their meeting on Wednesday, October 25, 2017, the University Council nominated Susan Mango to become a new Professor of Cell and Developmental Biology at the Biozentrum. Since 2009, Susan Mango has been Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology at the Harvard University in Cambridge, USA, where she heads a research group investigating the molecular basis of organ formation.
The developmental biologist, born in 1961 in New York City, studied at Harvard University and received her PhD at Princeton University. After postdoctoral studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Mango was appointed as H. A. and Edna Benning Professor of Oncological Sciences to the Huntsman Cancer Institute and the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.
In her research, Mango investigates the mechanisms of organ formation in an established model organism, the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. She particularly focuses on the earliest stages of organogenesis from the pluripotent stem cell to the first specific cells of the pharynx or foregut. So-called "master regulators" play an important role in regulating the cell fate on a genetic level. Using molecular and cell biology methods, Mango aims to identify such key factors and to elucidate how they control organ development. Recently, she has demonstrated that the environmental conditions experienced by the parents can modulate developmental processes in the nematode embryo.
Susan Mango is a renowned scientist in the field of developmental biology and has already received several prestigious research awards, such as the Merit Award of the National Institutes of Health in 2011 and a fellowship from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
Research group Susan Mango: https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/mango_lab/home
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