Professor Dr. Susan M. Gasser of the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research describes FMI’s fundamental connection between academia and industry in Switzerland, the effects of the foundation’s research, notably on Novartis, and future projects in the making.
Could you begin by introducing both yourself and your institute to our readers?
I am a molecular biologist with a background mostly in basic sciences. I studied biophysics and biochemistry and then completed a postdoc in Geneva on chromosome structure and chromatin genetics. I was at the Swiss Institute for Experimental Cancer Research for 15 years in Lausanne where I set up my own research program on genome stability and nuclear organization. I was a professor at the University of Geneva, studying questions of genome organization, gene expression, and gene silencing, when I was asked to run FMI, the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research, in Basel, in 2004.
Our mission is ... to train young scientists and researchers in scientific research in areas that are of interest to the pharmaceutical industry, and ... to conduct forefront fundamental biological and biomedical research.
