Susan Lindquist: a tribute

When I learned that Susan Lindquist had passed away at the age of 67 from cancer, my heart broke. This fierce flame for science and for women had been extinguished, and for a moment the world became a little dimmer. I first met Susan Lindquist in 1994 when I was a postdoc interviewing for a faculty position at the University of Chicago. Wemet for breakfast at a local diner.We talked about our science and she impressed upon me how supportive an environment the University of Chicago was for female scientists, how they were there for each other, cheering each other’s success, knowing that any time one of them succeeded, it became easier for all of them to succeed. And shortly after I returned home from that visit, I received a handwritten note from her, telling me how much she had liked the talk I gave about my research and howmuch she hoped I wouldmake her university my home. She made me feel that I had what it took, that I could take this path if I wanted to, and that she and other women would have my back and help me thrive in an academic setting. And just like that, Susan Lindquist became a lifelong mentor. I’ve never worked in her field, and yet she made herself available to me time and again as I embarked upon different projects, giving me her feedback, supporting me however she could. She supported mewhen I helped launch Public Library of Science (PLOS), hosting me to give a seminar at the Whitehead Institute, where she was then Director; and she supported me when I launched Disease Models & Mechanisms, providing critical guidance as one of its founding editors and even hosting a meeting that led to a special issue on protein-folding diseases (Brodsky, 2014). The issue included a poster review that was co-authored by Susan and is DMM’s mostread poster published to date (Valastyan and Lindquist, 2014). It’s no surprise DMM interviewed Susan for the first article in its ‘Model for Life’ section (Lindquist, 2008). In that article, she spoke about the criteria she used to select new members of her laboratory: “In terms of my own laboratory, I have two types of criteria. First, that people be bright and creative and rigorous.... Good scientists. But every bit as important, a very high priority in bringing someone in is knowing that they are generous, open, want to share information, like to help other people, and are willing and ready to accept advice from other people.” Born in Chicago, Susan was a first-generation college student at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, a graduate student at Harvard, and a postdoc at the University of Chicago, where she established her first lab. After 23 years at the University of Chicago, in 2001 she became the first woman to direct the Whitehead Institute, when she also joined the biology department faculty at MIT. She stepped down as Director of the Whitehead Institute in 2004 and remained a Whitehead Institute member, an associate member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, an associate Photo by Ceal Capistrano, Whitehead Institute.