Susan E. Celniker is an American biologist, a staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and an adjunct professor Comparative Biochemistry department at UC Berkeley. She is the co-director of the Berkeley Drosophila Genome Project. She has pioneered Drosophila functional genomics, the use of the fruit fly as a genetic model organism for human and environmental health, and launched studies of the transcriptome for NHGRI's

modENCODE The Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE) is a public research project which aims to identify functional elements in the human genome. ENCODE also supports further biomedical research by "generating community resources of genomics data, software, ...

(which serves as an encyclopedia of DNA Elements) project. Her work was pivotal in making the

Drosophila ''Drosophila'' () is a genus of flies, belonging to the family Drosophilidae, whose members are often called "small fruit flies" or (less frequently) pomace flies, vinegar flies, or wine flies, a reference to the characteristic of many speci ...

genome one of the best curated animal genomes, and a widely used model for genomic research.

Education

Celniker graduated from Pitzer College with a BA in Biology and Anthropology and her PhD in biochemistry from the

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill A university () is an institution of higher (or tertiary) education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. Universities typically offer both undergraduate and postgraduate programs. In the United States, th ...

Career

After completing her PhD, she started research as a postdoctoral fellow at

Caltech The California Institute of Technology (branded as Caltech or CIT)The university itself only spells its short form as "Caltech"; the institution considers other spellings such a"Cal Tech" and "CalTech" incorrect. The institute is also occasional ...

under NIH Postdoctoral Service Award from 1983 to 1986 where she worked with

Edward B. Lewis Edward Butts Lewis (May 20, 1918 – July 21, 2004) was an American geneticist, a corecipient of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. He helped to found the field of evolutionary developmental biology. Early life Lewis was born in Wi ...

(who later became Nobel Laureate in 1995) where she explored the structure and the function of Abdominal B (Abd-B), the most distal gene in the drosophila bithorax complex. In 1995, she was hired as a staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Women in Science

Celniker is an advocate of Women in STEM, and she is the founder of the "Leo Celniker Fund for Women in Science," named after her father Leo Celniker, who was a physicist and a member of National Organization of Women (NOW) for 20 years.

Awards and honors

* 2019 Berkeley Lab Lifetime Achievement Award * 2016 George Beadle Award from the Genetics Society of America.Genetics Society of America names Susan Celniker as recipient of George W. Beadle Award
/ref> * 2001 AAAS Newcomb Cleveland Prize for "The Genome Sequence of Drosophila melanogaster.”

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Celniker, Susan American women biologists Living people University of North Carolina alumni Year of birth missing (living people) American women academics 21st-century American women Pitzer College alumni California Institute of Technology fellows Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory people