Susan K. Dutcher

Biosketch

Susan K. Dutcher earned a bachelor’s degree in biology with honors from Colorado College. She went on to earn a doctorate in genetics from the University of Washington, where she worked on nuclear fusion in her training with Leland Hartwell, Ph.D., who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2001. Before coming to WashU Medicine, she did her postdoctoral work at Rockefeller University and was a professor of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental biology at the University of Colorado, Boulder for 16 years. While in Colorado, she discovered new isoforms of tubulin (delta, epsilon, and zeta) that are required for the assembly of basal bodies.
Dutcher, who joined the WashU Medicine faculty in 1999, is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Society for Cell Biology and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She received the 2019 George Engelmann Interdisciplinary Award from the Academy of Science-St. Louis and 2018 Distinguished Investigator and 2017 Distinguished Educator awards from WashU Medicine. Dutcher also was a Searle Scholar and won the National Science Foundation’s Faculty Award to Women Scientists and Engineers. She served as chair of the Department of Genetics from 2006-2009 and Director of the McDonnell Genome Center from 2016-2018.
She has taught genetics to undergraduates, graduate students and medical students. She has been involved in mentoring junior faculty in writing grants through the identification of mentors across the University.

Research Interests

Throughout her career, Dutcher has expanded scientists’ understanding of the structure and function of cilia. Cilia are hair-like structures on the surface of cells that act like antennas to process signals essential for development and survival, and beat in rhythmic fashion to remove potentially harmful pathogens. The malfunctioning of cilia or the structure that anchors them – called the basal body – can contribute to the development of chronic kidney and lung diseases, congenital heart defects and other health problems. Recent discoveries are advancing the understanding of how these human diseases develop and are opening doors to new possibilities for better treatments.
In pioneering studies, Dutcher has identified numerous genes required for the assembly and proper functioning of cilia in the green alga, Chlamydomonas, and their counterparts in humans. She developed a computational, comparative genomics approach that identified a large set of previously unknown cilia and basal body genes. Dutcher found that these genes are associated with human diseases, known collectively as ciliopathies, caused by the malfunctioning of cilia. Her studies have laid a foundation for improving the diagnosis and treatment of patients with ciliopathies, including those with polycystic kidney disease, which currently is treated with dialysis; primary ciliary dyskinesia, which causes chronic lung disease, misplaced organs and infertility. In collaboration with colleagues, she has enabled the analysis of the structure of cilia to obtain atomic resolution of many protein complex with cryo-EM.