By Mary Howard

After 40 years, Suzie Chen ’73 still finds scientific research fascinating. A professor of chemical biology at the Susan Lehman Cullen Laboratory of Cancer Research in the Ernest Mario School of Pharmacy of Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, Chen still sounds like a first-year student when she talks about DNA. “Each cell contains the genetic instructions to make any other cell in the body. Nature is absolutely amazing,” she says.

Chen has distinguished herself in the field of cancer research by studying the molecular mechanisms of melanoma, using a line of mice genetically altered in her laboratory. She found that riluzole, a drug used to treat Lou Gehrig’s disease (ALS), slows the growth of melanoma, the most aggressive form of malignant skin cancer. The drug promises to be an important treatment for patients in the late stages of the disease.

A native of Taiwan, Chen came to the United States with her parents when she was 13 years old. As a high-school student in New Haven, she spent weekends and summers working in a biology lab at Yale University. What started as a temporary job—“I was filling in for a friend who was on vacation”—turned into a life-changing experience. The professor who ran the lab took a liking to Chen, and soon she was a regular fixture.

“Whoever went on vacation, I took their job. I was a jack-of-all-trades,” says Chen, who learned how to make cell cultures, stain slides, and perform chemical analysis of gels. “By the time I graduated from Hillhouse High, I had a good idea of how research is done in a lab.”

A member of the first class at Trinity to accept women, she was also one of the first female mathematics majors at the school. “Math was easy,” she says. “I knew how to do it, and I didn’t have to write a lot of papers.” As a non-native English speaker, Chen found writing challenging. “It’s still not my favorite thing to do,” she says.

Chen’s experience at Yale helped her as an undergraduate at Trinity. Though she majored in math, she took a lot of science courses, including biochemistry, embryology, and genetics. Her first biology course at Trinity was genetics with Professor Donald Galbraith, professor emeritus of biology, who let Chen postpone the prerequisite for the course because of her lab experience at Yale. “I didn’t take ‘Introduction to Biology’ until my senior year,” says Chen, who is very grateful for the opportunity Galbraith gave her. “He trusted that I could handle the course. He took a chance on me, based on what I saw and learned in the Yale lab.” In her senior year, Galbraith hired Chen as a teaching assistant in his genetics course.

A powerful model for studying melanoma

After graduation, Chen earned a Ph.D. in genetics at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship in molecular biology at Columbia University. She says she was not sure if she wanted to be an M.D., but was always interested in the research side of medicine.

When her postdoctoral adviser, Dr. Robert Pollack, then dean of Columbia’s Department of Biological Sciences, asked her to run his lab, she took him up on the offer. For 13 years, Chen collaborated with Pollack and trained graduate students and post-doctoral candidates. She also conducted her own research.

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