On Sept. 1, the Department of Cell Biology welcomed assistant professor Sichen (Susan) Shao to its team. A Texas native, Shao came to HMS after completing postdoctoral work at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England.
We talked with Shao to find out why she loves combining old-fashioned lab tests with cutting-edge technologies, how science runs in her family and what she likes to do when she needs to “turn off” her brain.
Susan Shao
Assistant professor of cell biology
Research focus: We’re interested in how proteins are made and how they mature. Specifically, we’re interested in how ribosomes in mammalian cells produce proteins and how these proteins are directed to the correct cellular organelles and inserted into membranes. This is a rather complicated process where things can go wrong at any time, so we’re also interested in how cells regulate these processes for precise proteins and elicit quality-control responses when things go wrong.
We are primarily a basic-science lab. I’m driven by curiosity. But we believe the fundamental mechanisms we’re studying are broadly applicable. Maintaining the right level of protein homeostasis within cells is necessary for being healthy. Not having a good balance between protein biosynthesis and quality control is linked to a lot of age-related and neurodegenerative diseases. Our goal in the long term is to find distinct mechanisms that could be translated into clinical approaches.
Something old, something new: When I was studying biochemistry, I got engrossed in the techniques and the elegance of very simple assays. In my lab now, we use rather old-fashioned approaches. We put things in tubes and incubate them, we run gels and look for bands on Western blots or autoradiographs, and out comes a result that is hopefully interpretable and tells us something about a biological system.
We also use cryo-EM (cryo-electron microscopy) to solve the structures of the cellular machines that mediate protein production. I came here from the Laboratory of Molecular Biology, which is at the forefront of new cryo-EM technologies. We’re very excited about what’s to come here at Harvard.
Scientific heritage: My parents are technicians working in this same field, so I was exposed to all of this from the age of 6 or so. They used to take me into the lab and I got to run around. I respected what they did and I liked the lab environment. I was in awe of the postdocs, and the equipment looked so big. It still does—I’m not very tall! When I found out the questions people were pursuing and what you could do in science, around the time I was in college, I got confident that this is what I wanted to do.
An introvert recharges: My husband and I like to travel and go see movies, but otherwise I’m a homebody. I’m pretty introverted, actually, so at the end of long days I often end up on the couch watching TV or movies. Mostly chick flicks and superhero action movies; nothing you have to think too strongly about.
Why HMS: I’ve been very fortunate throughout my scientific career to work at institutions that have great resources—not only funding, but also intellectual. That’s what I was looking for in my own future. I saw how nice it is to find collaborators quickly, to walk down the hall and find somebody who’s interested in your work and who can understand it even if they’re not working on something directly related. I liked that about this department in particular. People here have an appreciation for how much you can learn through simple assays and getting your hands dirty.
