Prof. Suzanne Scarlata received her BA from Temple University in 1979 and her PhD from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 1985. She is a professor of Chemistry & Biochemistry at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Before joining WPI, she was a professor of physiology and biophysics at Stony Brook University, where she had taught since 1991. She previously served as an assistant professor in the Department of Medicine at Cornell University Medical College and as a member of the technical staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories, where she developed optical testing methods for printed circuit boards. She is the associate editor of the Journal of Bioenergetics and Biomembranes and serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Fluorescence and the Journal of Membrane Biology. She has also served on the editorial boards of Analytical Biochemistry, BBA Biomembranes, F1000, Journal of Biological Chemistry and Analytical Biochemistry, and Methods and Application of Fluorescence Spectroscopy. She studies how small molecules in the bloodstream can change the behavior of cells.