Susan Gottesman grew up in New York, received a B.A. from Radcliffe College (Harvard University) and a Ph.D. from the Dept. of Microbiology at Harvard Medical School with Jonathan Beckwith. She did postdoctoral work at the NIH with Max Gottesman (unrelated), working on the mechanism of bacteriophage lambda site-specific recombination. She then spent two years at MIT as a research associate, continuing her work on site-specific recombination; the instability of the lambda Xis protein, required for the recombination, led her to begin work on the roles of energy-dependent proteolysis in regulation of gene expression. She returned to the NIH in 1976 as a senior investigator in the Laboratory of Molecular Biology, where she has remained; she is currently Chief of the Biochemical Genetics Section of LMB. Her research has remained focused on regulatory mechanisms affecting cell growth and adaptation in E. coli and other bacteria. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1998 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1999 in recognition of her work on energy-dependent proteolysis. Starting about ten years ago, the lab discovered and began investigating a small non-coding RNA that affected the expression of a protein also regulated by proteolysis. Following that hint, her laboratory has become increasingly involved in the study of small non-coding RNAs in bacteria, in collaborations to identify them in the genome and in studies to delineate how they participate in regulatory circuits.