Mango Named MCB Professor

Susan E. Mango ’83, previously a professor of oncological sciences at the University of Utah’s School of Medicine and Huntsman Cancer Institute, has been appointed a professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology at Harvard, effective July 1, 2009.

Mango’s research focuses on organ development, mainly of the digestive tract, in the widely-studied worm C. elegans and the associated cancer and birth defects that can arise from mutations in these developmental genes.

Jeremy Bloxham, dean of science in FAS, praised Mango for being a leader in organogenesis.

“Her groundbreaking studies of the pathways involved in organ development have opened up alternative ways of thinking about developmental hierarchies and networks,” Bloxham said in the press release.

Mango’s lab is currently studying how the gut forms in worms—useful because they are transparent and so scientists can study a complicated process, like organogenesis, by watching the organ form from beginning to end in a living embryo.

“It’s just a very fascinating question because cells have to coordinate what they’re going to become, who they’re going to be, who their neighbor will be, and the shape they’re going to assume,” Mango said.

Last week the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation announced that it had awarded Mango one of this year’s MacArthur Foundation Fellowships—the “genius grants” that give each recipient $500,000 over a five-year period with “no strings attached.”

“I want to do something special with the money—I don’t want it to just get thrown in the pot,” Mango said.

She received the call “out of the blue” while she was running spell check in her office and only believed that the caller was actually from the MacArthur Foundation because her caller ID said just that.

“Some people think it’s a joke, but because I saw that I took it seriously,” Mango said.

She added that after receiving the award, she received e-mails from friends she hadn’t talked to in years, including her chemistry Teaching Fellow and her high school art teacher.

Mango, who received her undergraduate degree from Harvard and Ph.D. from Princeton, initially wanted to combine science and art and worked at the Smithsonian Institution and the National Gallery of Art after college.

She started studying gut formation in worms after “falling in love with a mutant.”

“We work on a gene and when you knock it out you lose the whole throat, but you get a little worm and it actually is born and crawls around on the plate” Mango said. “The first time I saw the mutant phenotype I was just completely smitten.”

Now that she is returning to Harvard, Mango has come full circle.

“My lab will be next to Rich Losick’s, and he taught me intro bio when I was an undergraduate,” Mango said.

—Staff writer Alissa M. D’Gama can be reached at adgama@fas.harvard.edu.