Abstract

Susan was awarded her BA (Mod) in Microbiology from Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. She continued her studies at Trinity College and completed a PhD entitled ’ The regulation of 3’ end processing under the supervision of Prof Ursula Bond. She continued with Prof Bond as a research associate investigating the adaptation of yeast brewing stress to high wort environments before moving initially to UMIST and then to The University of Manchester, where she carried out postdoctoral research on the impact of environmental stress on translation initiation in yeast, in the lab of Dr Mark Ashe. In 2013 she took up the position of Senior lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University, her research focuses on how the localisation of proteins within cells impacts upon their function. It is becoming increasingly evident that compartmentalisation of the cytoplasm of cells into discrete regions, enables efficient control of translation initiation. Understanding the regulation of this localisation is a key theme within her research. In particular, she is interested in how the compartmentalisation of translation initiation factors within a cell impact upon their function and how this may be important in addressing the molecular mechanisms behind diseases classically associated with translational deregulation. In particular, the neurodegenerative disease childhood ataxia with central nervous system hypomyelination (CACH) or leukoencephalopathy with vanishing white matter (VWM) has been linked to mutations in the translation initiation complex eIF2B and the molecular mechanisms behind how these mutations may impact upon these complexes of eIF2B is a key question within her research.