Susan Rae Wente
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Susan Wente | |
|---|---|
| 14th President of Wake Forest University | |
| Assumed office July 1, 2021 | |
| Preceded by | Nathan O. Hatch |
| Provost of Vanderbilt University | |
| In office July 2014 – June 2021 | |
| Preceded by | Richard C. McCarty |
| Succeeded by | C. Cybele Raver |
| Personal details | |
| Born | 1962 (age 63–64) |
| Education | University of Iowa (BS) University of California, Berkeley (PhD) |
Susan Wente (born 1962) is an American cell biologist and academic administrator who is the 14th president of Wake Forest University in North Carolina since July 2021. From 2014 to 2021 she was Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs at Vanderbilt University.[1] Between August 15, 2019 and June 30, 2020, she served as interim Chancellor at Vanderbilt.[2][3]
Wente graduated from the University of Iowa with a B.S. in biochemistry with high honors in 1984. She then completed her graduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where she received a Ph.D. in biochemistry in 1988. Her dissertation was titled, "Site-Directed Mutations Altering the Active Site and the Nucleotide-Binding Site of Aspartate Transcarbamoylase."[4]
Career
During her time at the University of Iowa (1980 - 1984), Wente worked as a research technician under F. Jeffery Field in the Lipid Research Core Laboratory at the University of Iowa College of Medicine. She was a student research collaborator with Marshall Elzinga in the Department of Biology at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York. Wente also completed her undergraduate thesis studies under the direction of Alice B. Fulton in the Department of Biochemistry. She became a teaching assistant in the Department of Biochemistry while at the University of California, Berkeley. Wente taught a biochemistry laboratory course the summer after obtaining her Ph.D. Wente engaged in a molecular biology postdoctoral fellowship with Ora Rosen at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City from 1988 - 1989. She then completed a postdoctoral fellowship with Günter Blobel at the Laboratory of Cell Biology at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at Rockefeller University in New York City from 1989 - 1993. She received a Beckman Young Investigators Award in 1996.[5][6]
Wente became an assistant professor of Cell Biology and Physiology at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Missouri in 1993 and associate professor in 1998.[4] She began working at Vanderbilt in 2002 as the department chair and professor of cell and developmental biology.[7] In December 2008, she became an assistant vice chancellor for research at Vanderbilt. In 2009, she was promoted to associate vice chancellor for research and senior associate dean for biomedical sciences. She was named Vanderbilt's provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs in July 2014.[8] Wente was announced as the 14th and first female President of Wake Forest University on January 29, 2021, and assumed office on July 1, 2021.[9]
Wente serves on the editorial boards for the journals Advances in Biological Regulation, Current Opinion in Cell Biology and Nucleus.[10][11] She previously served as an editor of Molecular and Cellular Biology (1999-2003) and associate editor of Molecular Biology of the Cell (2004-2009).[12] She previously served on the editorial board of Traffic (2004-2014) and Molecular and Cellular Biology (1999-2013).
Current research
Wente's current[when?] research focuses on the cell's adaptability to changing environmental conditions. She focuses on the exchange of large molecules between the nucleus and the cytoplasm. She focuses mostly on the border of this exchange, called the NPC. Wente's work targets three specific questions:
- How the NPC is created from its composition and how this affects the way genes are expressed
- How the movement through the NPCs is regulated
- How other factors associated with NPCs play a role in other steps of gene expression
To view the cells and perform her studies, Wente uses yeast and fluorescent imaging. She studies these cells by examining interactions between the NPCs and its receptors for imported and exported material. She further studies the NPCs by observing its supporting proteins and determining the functions of these proteins. In doing so, she can test different hypotheses and figure out how these proteins could potentially malfunction and lead to various disease pathologies.[13]
