Rate My Professor Susan Parkhurst

Susan Parkhurst, PhD, is a Professor in the Basic Sciences Division at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, where she joined in 1992. She holds the Mark Groudine Endowed Chair for Outstanding Achievements in Science and Service, appointed in 2022, and serves as an Affiliate Professor of Biology at the University of Washington. Parkhurst received her BA in Biology in 1982 and PhD in Developmental Biology in 1985 from Johns Hopkins University. She completed postdoctoral fellowships in Developmental Genetics at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund in Oxford, UK, in 1986, and at the California Institute of Technology in 1990. Her career includes significant leadership roles such as co-associate director of the Basic Sciences Division from 2000 to 2004, membership on the division's executive committee since 2015, service on the Fred Hutch Graduate Affairs Committee since 1993, and chairing the Harold M. Weintraub Graduate Student Award committee since 1999. She represented Fred Hutch on the steering committee for the National Cancer Institute grant supporting the Fred Hutch/University of Washington/Seattle Children’s Cancer Consortium for 18 years and founded the Fred Hutch Postbaccalaureate Scholar Program to provide lab training for early-career researchers.

The Parkhurst Lab applies multidisciplinary approaches using Drosophila to study cytoskeleton dynamics in processes including cell wound repair and nuclear architecture and organization. Dysfunctional cytoskeletons contribute to diseases such as cancer, and her work aims to identify therapeutic targets. Key publications include 'Two Septin Complexes Mediate Actin Dynamics During Cell Wound Repair' (Cell Reports, 2024), 'Calcium influx rapidly establishes distinct spatial recruitments of Annexins to cell wounds' (Genetics, 2024), 'Septin Complexes: Ahead of the Curve' (Cytoskeleton, 2024), 'The Centralspindlin proteins Pavarotti and Tumbleweed function in Nuclear Envelope budding' (J. Cell Biol., 2023), and highly cited earlier papers such as 'Parallels between tissue repair and embryo morphogenesis' (2004). Parkhurst was named a 2024 Fellow of the American Society for Cell Biology for her contributions to cell biology research on wound repair and mentorship of young scientists. Her systematic genetic screens have identified over 400 genes required for cell wound repair, advancing understanding of membrane repair mechanisms with implications for regenerative medicine.