Susan E. Celniker is an American biologist, a staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and an adjunct professor Comparative Biochemistry department at University of California, Berkeley.
[1] She has pioneered Drosophila functional genomics,[2] the use of the fruit fly as a genetic model organism for human and environmental health, and launched studies of the transcriptome for NHGRI's modENCODE (which serves as an encyclopedia of DNA Elements) project.
Celniker graduated from Pitzer College with a BA in Biology and Anthropology and her PhD in biochemistry from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
[3] After completing her PhD, she started research as a postdoctoral fellow at Caltech under NIH Postdoctoral Service Award from 1983 to 1986 where she worked with Edward B. Lewis (who later became Nobel Laureate in 1995) where she explored the structure and the function of Abdominal B (Abd-B), the most distal gene in the Drosophila bithorax complex.
[4] In 1995, she was hired as a staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.