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K-INBRIEF is published by the Kansas INBRE Office based at the University of Kansas Medical Center, 3901 Rainbow Blvd., Mail Stop 3050, Kansas City, Kansas 66160-7104. For additional information, contact Sarah E. Velasquez
This newsletter is made possible by NIH Grant # P20 RR016475 from the INBRE program of the National Center for Research Resources. Its contents are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of NIH. To learn more about the K-INBRE, visit www.kumc.edu/kinbre.
November 2010
K-INBRE Bioinformatics Core Director at Kansas State University Receives Distinguished Graduate Faculty Award
Susan Brown, PhD, professor of biology at Kansas State University, has received one of two KSU Distinguished Graduate Faculty Awards, supported by the William T. Kemper Foundation and the Commerce Bancshares Foundation. The annual award, which comes with a $2,500 honorarium, honors faculty who have distinguished themselves nationally and internationally for excellence in research and graduate education.
“All of the graduate faculty work hard to mentor students, so it is an honor to be selected by my peers for this award,” said Dr. Brown.
Dr. Brown is a developmental geneticist studying the genetic regulation of embryonic development in the red flour beetle, Tribolium castaneum. She has developed genetic and genomic tools to establish Tribolium as a premiere genetic model organism and was a leader in the Tribolium genome project, which produced the first complete genome sequence of a beetle. Dr. Brown is the director of the Arthropod Genomics Center and the K-State Bioinformatics Center at KSU.
“Sue is a real star,” said Dr. Rob Dennel, KSU University Distinguished Professor of Biology and Director, Terry C. Johnson Canter for Basic Cancer Research. “In addition to maintaining a highly successful personal research effort, she has created and directs major campus programs that have achieved international recognition and aid many K-State faculty researchers.”
Dr. Brown has served as KSU’s bioinformatics core director for the Kansas IDeA Network of Biomedical Research Excellence (K-INBRE) since 2001.
“Sue Brown’s exceptionally diverse experiences as a renowned molecular geneticist is a tremendous benefit to our bioinformatics community,” said KU’s Dr. Gerry Lushington, K-INBRE Biolinformatics Core Director. “She is capable of injecting insight into all of the wide ranging topics that cross our discussion paths, and her background in developing novel biological model systems is a strength that we should all be exploiting as we look to formulate and validate increasingly complex new analytical techniques.”
Dr. Brown earned a bachelor’s degree in biology from Smith College and a doctorate in genetics from the University of Missouri-Columbia. She joined K-State as a research associate in 1983 and became a full professor in 2007.