Susan Bailey has received tenure and been promoted from assistant professor to associate professor of biology in the School of Arts & Sciences.
Bailey received a bachelor’s degree in Biology and Mathematics from McMaster University in 2003, a master’s degree in Ecology from the University of Calgary in 2007, and a Ph.D. in Evolutionary Ecology from the University of Ottawa in 2013. She came to Clarkson in 2017.
Before coming to Clarkson, Bailey was a postdoctoral researcher at the Bioinformatics Research Centre, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark. She also has teaching experience from the University of Ottawa, University of Calgary, and Aarhus University.
Her research interests use a combination of microbial experimental evolution, bioinformatics, and mathematical/ statistical modeling approaches to investigate processes that drive evolutionary adaptation and diversification.
She was recently awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award for her research aimed at understanding how microbes evolve in complex environments. Bailey’s award is the first of its kind to be awarded in Clarkson’s Biology Department. The funded project, titled “The effects of spatial structure and heterogeneity on local adaptation, diversification, and dispersal evolution: Experimental tests and statistical models,” will support both research and educational outreach.
She is also co-director of the NSF-funded Mathematical Biology Team Science Research Experience for Undergrads (MBioTS-REU), an interdisciplinary summer research experience introducing undergraduate students to collaborative research at the intersection of biology and mathematics at Clarkson.
In 2016, she received the prestigious Jasper Loftus-Hills Young Investigators Award from the Society of American Naturalists, the major scientific organization for ecology-evolution-organismal biology. Bailey also has published articles in refereed journals and has received several travel awards and prestigious graduate scholarships.
Bailey is a member of the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution, the European Society of Evolutionary Biology, and the American Society for Microbiology.