Susan Mary Lea FRS FMedSci (born 1969)[6] is a British biologist who serves as chief of the center for structural biology at the National Cancer Institute.

[6] Lea was a graduate researcher in the laboratory of molecular biophysics at the University of Oxford, where she worked under the supervision of David Stuart.

[5] After her DPhil, she was awarded a Dorothy Hodgkin fellowship and started her independent research group in the department of biochemistry.

[9][14] Lea makes use of structural information from cryogenic electron microscopy and x-ray crystallography to understand biomolecules and medical pathways.

She studies the serum resident protein cascades that are involved in immune responses.