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Susan Mango, PhD, is an investigator at Huntsman Cancer Institute and professor in the Department of Oncological Sciences at the University of Utah School of Medicine. She leads a research team that focuses on discovering the genes that control the formation and physiology of the digestive tract. The genes necessary for these processes are often mutated in cancer or in birth defects. Mango’s research group also focuses on these three areas: the cellular mechanisms that generate an epithelial tube, the role of the digestive tract during starvation, and the processes that govern how cells are specified to become part of the digestive tract.
Mango uses a variety of techniques, including microarray technology, time-lapse microscopy, and RNAi gene interference, to understand how a model system accomplishes the complex pattern of gene expression necessary to the development of organs. Through her studies of the pharynx, or throat, of the nematode worm, she hopes to understand how a protein might specify organ identity and how the coordinated expression of hundreds of genes is accomplished by a single regulator. This work could lead to new treatments for silencing malfunctioning genes that lead to cancer.
After Mango’s undergraduate education at Harvard/Radcliffe University, she earned a PhD at Princeton University. Before joining Huntsman Cancer Institute in 1996, she completed a postdoctoral fellowship in developmental biology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has been awarded fellowships from several organizations, including Princeton University and the Helen Hay Whitney Foundation. She received the prestigious Basil O’Connor Starter Scholar Research Award from the March of Dimes and the Harland Winfield Mossman Developmental Biologists’ Award from the American Association of Anatomists. She currently holds grants from the National Institutes of Health.
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