Susan Ramus

Professor Susan Ramus is an internationally recognized expert in ovarian cancer research at the University of New South Wales, where she serves as a Professor in the School of Clinical Medicine. She leads the Molecular Oncology Group and is a member of the Adult Cancer Program within the Lowy Cancer Research Centre, located at the intersection of High and Botany Streets in Sydney.

Dr. Ramus completed her PhD at the University of Melbourne and has established herself as a global leader in ovarian cancer genetics and genomics. Her research vision focuses on improving ovarian cancer prognosis through early detection via genetic risk prediction and developing personalized treatment approaches using tumor profiling.

Her primary research interests span ovarian cancer genetics, genomics and transcriptomics, with emphasis on identifying both common variants through Genome Wide Association Studies (GWAS) and rare variants through whole exome sequencing. Professor Ramus has established and co-leads the Ovarian Tumour Tissue Analysis (OTTA) consortium and serves on the steering committee of the Ovarian Cancer Association Consortium (OCAC), where she also participates in the genotyping committee and data access committees for both OCAC and OTTA.

Among her notable achievements, Professor Ramus received the prestigious 2022 NHMRC Elizabeth Blackburn Investigator Grant Award for basic science. Her research program is supported by substantial funding from multiple sources including the National Health and Medical Research Council (2022-2026 L3 Investigator grant, 2021-2026 POCCA-SPOT project), Department of Defence (2016-2023 MOCOG), Cancer Australia, Cancer Council NSW, and the National Institutes of Health (USA).

Professor Ramus actively supervises PhD students as well as honors and ILP students, with supervision keywords including bioinformatics analysis, computational genomics, and genetics of epithelial ovarian cancer. She is a member of the American Association for Cancer Research and contributes to multiple international consortia focused on advancing ovarian cancer research.

Her laboratory work through the Molecular Oncology Group conducts large-scale genomic analyses of formalin fixed paraffin embedded tumors using cutting-edge technologies including NanoString RNA expression, TamSeq for somatic mutation screening, and shallow whole genome sequencing for DNA copy number analysis, all aimed at identifying prognostic markers and therapeutic targets for ovarian cancer patients.