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Susan M. Benton, Ph.D.

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 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.

  • Biotechnology Patents
  • Academic Research and Technology Transfer
  • Animal Health
  • Medical Devices
  • Pharma and Nutra

Baylor College of Medicine, Ph.D., Integrative Molecular and Biomedical Sciences, 2021

  • Thesis Title – Characterizing genetic modifiers of intestinal tumorigenesis – Jason Heaney Laboratory

California State University Long Beach, B.S., Biology Emphasis in Cell & Molecular Biology, 2011

Life Sciences Patent Academy, 2024

UDACITY, Business Analytics Nanodegree, 2022

  • Projects: Query Music Store Database with SQL, US Census Demographic Data Tableau Visualizations

California State University Long Beach, Biotechnology Certificate with Stem Cell Emphasis, 2012

California Institute for Regenerative Medicine Bridges Intern

 

Webster NJ, Maywald RL, Benton SM, et al. Testicular germ cell tumors arise in the absence of sex-specific differentiation. Development. 148(9) (2021) PMID: 33912935

Dawson, EP, Lanza DG, Webster NJ, Benton SM, et al. Delayed male germ cell specification permits transition into embryonal carcinoma cells with features of primed pluripotency. Development. 145(6). (2018) PMID: 29545285

Maywald RL, Doerner SK, Pastorelli L, et. al. IL-33 activates tumor stroma to promote intestinal polyposis. PNAS. 112(19) (2015) PMID: 25918379

Humphreys AF, Tan J, Peng R, et al. Generation and characterization of antibodies against Asian elephant (Elephas maximus) IgG, IgM, and IgA. PLoS One. 10(2) (2015) PMID: 25658336

The Cancer Genome Atlas Research Network. Comprehensive molecular characterization of clear cell renal cell carcinoma. Nature. 499, 43-49 (2013) PMID: 23792563

Susan M. Benton, Ph.D.

Contact Details

Karen Dodson

515-288-3667 Ext. 5975


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