Sue Ann did her undergraduate studies in Biology at Midwestern State University in Wichita Falls, Texas, and remained there for her M.S. in Biology under the direction of Dr. Fred Stangl. She received her Ph.D. in Genetics at Texas A&M University under the direction of Dr. Ira Greenbaum, where she worked on the inheritance of fragile sites in deer mice, as well as studying chromosomal rearrangements in different populations of lemmings from Northwest Territories, Canada.
It was during her Ph.D. studies that she attended and presented at her first ACC meeting in 1994 at the Wintergreen Resort in Virginia. She has attended every single ACC meeting since that first one, and received several ACC student travel awards.
After obtaining her Ph.D., she moved a little further south to Houston and pursued post-doctoral studies at Baylor College of Medicine under the mentorship of Dr. Lisa Shaffer. She and Dr. Shaffer hosted the ACC meeting in Galveston in 2000, and together they presented the first ACC Distinguished Cytogeneticist Award to Dr. TC Hsu.
In 1999, she successfully completed the ABMG post-doctoral training program at Baylor College of Medicine, and obtained her ABMG certification in clinical cytogenetics. She remained there for some time as an associate director of the Kleberg Cytogenetics Laboratory. In 2001, she took a director position at Genzyme Genetics in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She, Dr. Laurel Estabrooks, and Dr. Kathleen Rao hosted the 2002 ACC meeting in Santa Fe. She continued to work at Genzyme Genetics in Santa Fe until Fall of 2005; she then made the move to the Genzyme Genetics facility in Tampa, FL.
In 2011, she branched out on her own and started her clinical consulting company, Xact Genetics, LLC. She currently resides in Joy, Texas and maintains a CLIA-certified clinical consulting lab at her farm home. When the ACC was incorporated in 2005, Sue Ann was asked to serve as the first secretary/treasurer, and she served in that role for 13 years until turning it over to another in 2018. In addition to working as a clinical consultant, Sue Ann also teaches Clinical Cytogenetics for the Genetic Counseling Graduate Program at the University of Arkansas every spring semester. On the farm in Joy, she raises registered red angus and black angus cattle, as well as exotics including registered fallow deer, axis deer, and blackbuck antelope, and one little aoudad named Rose.
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