Dr. Suzanne Walker

Biography

Suzanne Walker is a Professor of Microbiology at Harvard Medical School. Her research primarily addresses the problem of antibiotic resistance by investigating bacterial pathways and targets for new antibiotics. She conducts detailed mechanistic and structural studies of known antibiotic targets with the expectation that understanding their function will lead to the ability to design improved antibiotics. Dr. Walker explores the mechanisms of action of natural product antibiotics to understand the strategies that nature employs to kill bacteria and works on developing strategies to discover new antibiotics and methods to modify natural product antibiotics to improve their properties. Additionally, she investigates the mechanisms of resistance to selected antibiotics. Her studies utilize biophysical approaches to study protein structure, probe enzyme function through biochemistry, and employ genetics to explore gene function in selected microorganisms while manipulating natural product biosynthetic pathways. High-throughput screening is also in her repertoire to discover compounds that interfere with biosynthetic pathways. Among the microorganisms she studies are Escherichia coli, Enterococcus faecalis, and Staphylococcus aureus.

Research Interests