Dr. Susan Marqusee is the assistant director for the Directorate for Biological Sciences for the National Science Foundation. Marqusee is a distinguished professor of molecular and cell biology and chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley), and a Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Investigator. From 2010 to 2020, she served as the director for the California Institute of Quantitative Biosciences, or QB3, at UC Berkeley.
Marqusee has earned numerous awards and honors, including the Margaret Dayhoff Award from the Biophysical Society, the William Rose Award from the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and the Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin Award from The Protein Society. She is a fellow of both the Biophysical Society and the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2013) and the National Academy of Sciences (2016).
Marqusee received bachelor’s degrees in physics and chemistry from Cornell University and a doctorate in biochemistry and a medical degree from Stanford University. As a biophysical chemist, her research focuses on deciphering the structural and dynamic information encoded in a protein’s amino acid sequence with the goal of understanding and predicting how changes in the sequence and environment affect a protein’s energy landscape and function.