Susan Wong trained in medicine at Kings College London, where she also gained her PhD before moving on to work at Yale University, USA. She was later awarded a Wellcome Trust Senior Clinical Fellowship in the UK and established a laboratory at Bristol University. She went on to work at Cardiff University and is now a Professor of Experimental Diabetes and Metabolism at the School of Medicine and Honorary Consultant Physician in Diabetes at the University Hospital of Wales, Cardiff.
Professor Wong has many years of research experience looking at the insulin-producing beta cells of the pancreas in type 1 diabetes. Her research primarily focuses on causes and development of type 1 diabetes and has encompassed T cell immunology, B cell immunology, regulatory T cells, innate immunity and, more recently, the role of the gut microbiome. She is a member of the UK Type 1 Diabetes Consortium and, in this role, and works on a number of projects developing immunotherapy for type 1 diabetes and in early phase 1a clinical trials.
She has published more than 150 articles and is on the editorial board of Current Molecular Medicine and Scientific Reports. She is Chair of the Scientific Advisory Board for JDRF UK, Deputy Chair of the Clinical Studies Group I (Pathogenesis of diabetes) of Diabetes UK, and a member of the Type 1 Diabetes UK Consortium management board. She has served on grant review panels of the NIH (Special Emphasis Diabetes), MRC, JDRF, Diabetes UK, and Hong Kong Research General Council. During her career, she has been awarded several accolades, including the Diabetes UK Dorothy Hodgkin award lecturer in 2018 and Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales in 2019.