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The American Society for Cell Biology has named Fred Hutch Cancer Center cell biologist Susan Parkhurst, PhD, a fellow.
The honor, announced today, acknowledges scientists chosen by their peers for lifetime achievements in the field of cell biology.
Parkhurst joined Fred Hutch Cancer Center in 1992 and holds the Mark Groudine Endowed Chair for Outstanding Achievements in Science and Service.
She published her first scientific paper, about opportunistic hospital infections, while still in high school. The first person in her family to go to college, Parkhurst developed her own project in a cancer lab while still an undergraduate student at Johns Hopkins University.
Her graduate work, also at Johns Hopkins University, and research at the University of Oxford and California Institute of Technology established her reputation early as an innovative and prolific scientist. Working in the Basic Sciences Division at Fred Hutch, she became a world-leading expert on the cytoskeleton, the internal cellular scaffolding that helps regulate cell shape and function.
The cytoskeleton also plays an important role in repairing cell membranes that are damaged from wounds. Using fruit flies as a model organism of human biology, her lab has identified 400 genes required for cell wound repair.
“Her discoveries have not only shed light on fundamental cellular processes but have significant health implications for wound healing and regenerative medicine,” said Sue Biggins, PhD, who directs the Basic Sciences Division. “Her work has greatly contributed to a significantly more complete understanding of the dynamics and mechanisms that cells employ to maintain their structure. Crucially, she has also detailed many dysregulations that can arise and their health-related consequences.”
Biggins was the first Fred Hutch faculty member to be named an ASCB fellow. Parkhurst is the second.
“It’s nice to be recognized for cell biology,” Parkhurst said. “The ASCB is a great organization, what I consider the gold standard for how a society should work. It supports its members really well, as it is, but it also always tries to innovate and find new ways to help people. It’s exceptionally good at doing that, which I think brings the new generation in but doesn’t forget the old and integrates things incredibly well. I’m happy to be part of that.”
The honor reflects not only her scientific excellence, but her commitment to mentorship, especially to young scientists fresh out of college who are eager to learn the bench science skills that will make them competitive applicants for PhD programs.
Soon after Parkhurst joined Fred Hutch, which had no formal graduate student program, she helped found the Graduate Affairs Committee, which worked with colleagues at the University of Washington to establish the Molecular and Cellular Biology Graduate Program.
Recently, she helped create the Fred Hutch Postbaccalaureate Scholar Program, which has grown to 40 scholars this year.
“She spearheaded the establishment of Fred Hutch’s postbaccalaureate (postbac) scholar program, which helps to serve as a stopgap in the leaky pipeline of underrepresented populations in research,” Biggins said. “The program offers training and mentorship for individuals who have completed their bachelor’s degree but need hands-on experience in a lab to be competitive for graduate school. Susan was instrumental in setting up the postbac program.”
Read on for a Q & A with Parkhurst about the importance of mentorship in science
You grew up in a military family that moved around a lot and by the time you reached your senior year of high school in Colorado, you had already taken all the available science classes. How did your teachers help you continue your education?
At that point there were no advanced placement programs like there are now. I had really really excellent teachers and they basically made a curriculum for me the last year. My science teacher would bring in journal articles to read and go through them — things that you would do if you were a scientist, which you would never do in a classroom. That gave me a lot of experiences that other people didn’t have.
They didn’t make you co-dependent, they made you independent. They gave you the skills you needed to do everything you needed to do rather than just knowledge or a check-the-box kind of mentality.
It made it clear to me that that was really important. I learned that you have to have a really good foundation. If you have that, you can pretty much work out all the other things.
The first paper I published was in high school. In one of my summer jobs, the person who was there cared enough to show me what it meant to write a paper, how to collect data and how to do stuff. I could do enough in the summer to warrant authorship on a publication.
I recognized that you could do that if you were taught how and were given the option of doing that no matter how old you are, so that’s why I wanted to give that opportunity to other people.
You describe fundamental science in plain language for audiences who do not have a science background, explaining, for example, why bandages that claim to leave no scars really do work by reducing inflammation and preventing infection. Where did you learn those communication skills?
Because I was in a military background, I was living with a lot of diverse cultures and a lot of diverse people all the time. That to me was just my norm.
I didn’t grow up in a hometown where everybody’s the same. It was always different and always varied. You learn to talk to different people. That’s just something I learned very early on. My parents were also very good at that. It didn’t matter who it was, you talked to them with respect.
It was my upbringing. It started that way and it’s always been that way for me.
You look at your audience and you figure out who you are talking to and what you need to tell them so that they can appreciate what you’re saying, and then on the opposite side, you’re supposed to listen the same way and try to understand people for what they say to you.
That was instilled in me from the beginning.
This year the Fred Hutch Postbaccalaureate Scholar Program you helped create has placed three students in your lab. What are you learning about the genetics of wound healing in fruit flies that excites you and the next generation of scientists learning in your lab?
We’re having a field day. We’ve identified a couple hundred genes now that are all involved in wound healing. It’s helping us understand, for example, why burning would do one thing where stabbing would do another, because we can see those differences in time and in space.
For my career, most of my lab has been on the younger end, not so much postdocs but people right out of college who need experience and need to learn how to do that, to be trusted to take on a project. I wanted to be able to keep giving people that same experience because I think it matters. It’s the foundation of everything they are going to do next.
A lot of the people who come to my lab right out of college spend a couple of years here before they go to grad school or something else. They get publications and some of their records are better than graduate students because they care, and they just need opportunity, and they need a little bit of fostering to show them what they need to know and what they need to learn.
I have three postbacs in my lab: One is from Indiana, one is from Arizona and one is from California. These are really good people.
So far, the program is doing exactly what we want it to do.
