Susan T. Lovett

Susan Thomas Lovett is an American molecular biologist who is the Abraham S. and Gertrude Burg Professor of Microbiology at Brandeis University. She is interested in the mechanisms that allow the genetic material in cells to remain stable over time.

Early life and education Lovett was born in Rochester, New York. She spent her childhood in Virginia and Ohio. She moved to the University of California, Berkeley for her doctoral research, where she investigated Escherichia coli. She was a postdoctoral researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. She is a molecular biologist who studies the mechanisms that underpin DNA repair. In particular, Lovett has studied how cells protect their genetic information and avoid genetic mutation. These strategies help to tackle cancer and prevent cells from ageing. She has worked on the model organism Escherichia coli since the beginning of her career, and identified a secondary DNA damage response that is independent of the well-documented SOS response. Lovett identified many of the enzymes involves with DNA repair, including the post-transcriptional regulatory protein IraD, the ExoX and RecJ exonucleases, the Eubacterial protein RadA/Sms and the DNA helicase YoaA.

From 2006 to 2010, Lovett taught on the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory course in Advanced Bacterial Genetics. 2013 Elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science 2017 Brandeis University Dean of Arts and Sciences Service Award 2020 Elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Selected publications