Susan Golden

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Susan Golden (née Stephens) is a Professor of molecular biology known for her research in circadian rhythms. She is currently a faculty member at UC San Diego.

Golden was born in Pine Bluff, Arkansas in 1957.^[1] She attended the local public high school, where she was involved with the marching band and school newspaper. She was accepted to the Mississippi University for Women in 1976 as a journalism major, but soon switched her studies to major in biology and minor in chemistry.

Golden graduated from MUW in two years, after which she was offered a position in the first cohort of trainees in a NIH-financed doctoral program in genetics at the University of Missouri. During her graduate program, Golden met James Golden, a fellow doctoral student.^[2] They later married in 1979. At the University of Missouri, Golden researched the protein makeup of the photosynthetic center in cyanobacteria, work she continued when she moved to the University of Chicago in 1983 as a postdoctoral research fellow.^[1]

In 1986 Golden accepted a faculty position at Texas A&M to further her investigation into light-dependent gene regulation in bacteria. While at Texas A&M, Golden became interested in studying circadian rhythms after her first encounter with Carl H. Johnson and Takao Kondo, with whom she would go on to discover the Kai complex.^[2] Golden was promoted to Distinguished Professor at Texas A&M in 2003, and then moved to UC San Diego in 2008 where she is currently a Distinguished Professor and the Director of the Center for Circadian Biology.^[3]