Sue Jinks-Robertson, PhD
Professor and co-Vice Chair
Director, Cell and Molecular Biology Program
sue.robertson@duke.edu
Biography:
Sue Jinks-Robertson grew up in the panhandle of Florida on the Gulf Coast. From an early age she had an interest in and aptitude for science, and her career path was set when she took her first Genetics course in college. She graduated from Agnes Scott College (a liberal arts women’s college in Decatur, GA) in 1977, and obtained a PhD in Genetics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1983. Her thesis research focused on the regulation of ribosome biosynthesis in E. coli and was done under the tutelage of Masayasu Nomura. As a postdoc at the University of Chicago, Sue moved into the yeast model system under the expert guidance of now-colleague Tom Petes. She returned to Georgia in 1986 and spent the first 20 years of her faculty career in the Biology Department at Emory University. In 2006, she moved to Duke University where she has continued her work on DNA repair and surveillance mechanisms in yeast. Current studies are focused on elucidating molecular mechanisms of homologous recombination and on understanding how transcription destabilizes the underlying DNA template.
Sue was elected as a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology in 2010 and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2011. She currently serves as Treasurer of the Genetic Society of America and as an Editor for the journals DNA Repair and PLoS Genetics.
