Susan Marqusee

Dr. Susan Marqusee is the assistant director for the Directorate for Biological Sciences at the U.S. National Science Foundation.

She comes to the U.S. National Science Foundation from her position as a distinguished professor of molecular and cell biology and chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley and a Chan Zuckerberg Biohub investigator. From 2010-2020, she served as the director for the California Institute of Quantitative Biosciences 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).

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. The fundamental nature of her work has had significant impact on many other areas of research, ranging from the physical chemistry of macromolecules to the design of therapeutics that prevent the aggregation of proteins, a phenomenon that can lead to neurogenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's.

Marqusee received a bachelor's in physics and chemistry from Cornell University, a doctorate in biochemistry, and a medical degree from Stanford University.