Susan M. Benton, Ph.D. Joins McKee, Voorhees & Sease, PLCFebruary 16, 2024

MVS is excited to announce that Susan M. Benton, Ph.D. has joined us as Technical Specialist in the Biotechnology and Chemical Practice Group.

Susan is a scientist with an extensive amount of computational and wet lab experience. Her computational work includes data analysis & visualization, bioinformatics, genomics, screening analysis, data and service management platforms and electronic laboratory notebooks. Susan’s wet lab experience includes next-generation sequencing, nucleic acids & protein, polysome profiling, tissue and bacterial cultures, animal models, reporter assays and gene editing.

Prior to joining McKee, Voorhees & Sease, Susan served as an Application and Data Engineer for Refractor Biosciences/WEGA where she supported scientific research as the local contact for research IT applications support, connecting scientists and consultants in Europe and San Diego. Susan also collaborated with scientific domain experts to determine needs and enable project teams to make faster and better decisions during the drug discovery process. She also assisted in implementing and supporting compound and assay data registration applications for drug discovery. Additionally, she was a project lead for tech/data transfer between international sites ensuring timely, complete, and accurate data transfer.

Susan was also a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California San Diego where she performed a Phenome Wide Association study of short tandem repeats (STRs) on UK Biobank data to determine phenotypes associated with specific STR genotypes. As part of the study Susan wrote scripts to collect, clean, and analyze data by gene from UK Biobank data. She also did a systematic analysis of the impact of short tandem repeats on gene expression. Susan adapted and optimized a Massively Parallel Reporter Assay (MPRA) workflow for analyzing changes in STR repeat length and sequence. She developed a computational pipeline to analyze MPRA results.

“Susan is a great addition to our team at MVS and provides additional depth to our  Biotechnology and Chemical Practice Group. We are excited to have Susan’s knowledge in the fields of cell and molecular biology, to help our clients protect their intellectual property assets,” said Heidi Sease Nebel, Partner and Chair of the Biotechnology and Chemical Practice Group.

Susan has a Ph.D. in Integrative Molecular & Biomedical Sciences from the Baylor College of Medicine. Previously, she received her undergraduate degree in Cell and Molecular Biology from California State University Long Beach.