Professor Susan Gasser is Director of the ISREC Foundation for Cancer Research in Lausanne, Switzerland. She studied biophysics at the University of Chicago, completing her PhD at the University of Basel in Biochemistry. Following postdoctoral studies on mitotic chromosome structure at the University of Geneva, she led a research group on chromatin organization and replication at the Swiss Institute for Experimental Cancer Research (ISREC) in Lausanne. In 2001, she became Professor of Molecular Biology at the University of Geneva, and then moved to Basel as Director of the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research and Professor at the University of Basel from 2004-2020. Her laboratory studies the functional impact of the spatial packaging of interphase chromatin on heritable gene expression. Specific focus areas include the identification of factors that spatially segregate large chromatin domains, dynamic changes in chromatin during DNA repair and stress-induced epigenetic function. Her lab has used both budding yeast and the nematode c. elegans for their discoveries.