Erin O'Shea

Erin O'Shea is the President of Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Paul C. Mangelsdorf Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology and of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard University. She graduated from Smith College with a bachelor's degree in biochemistry and went on to receive a PhD in chemistry from MIT. She began a faculty position at UC - San Francisco in 1993 and was appointed as an HHMI Investigator in 2000, before moving to Harvard in 2005.

Erin's lab has studied how cells monitor the environment and regulate gene expression, work that has implications for understanding cancer and other diseases. She has also been interested in deciphering the logic of signalling and transcriptional control, and in understanding the function and mechanism of oscillation of a three-protein circadian clock.  She will begin a new lab at HHMI's Janelia Research Campus in 2017 focused on neuronal cell biology.

Erin is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Academy of Microbiology and has received numerous awards including the National Academy of Sciences Award in Molecular Biology and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation Fellowship.