Erin K. O’Shea, PhD, serves as Vice President and Chief Scientific Officer. O’Shea directs HHMI's flagship investigator program, in which leading scientists and their staffs conduct research in HHMI laboratories across the United States. O’Shea is also responsible for identifying new opportunities that capitalize on the Institute's expertise in biomedical research and science education.
O’Shea joined HHMI in 2013, coming to the Institute from Harvard University, where she had been an HHMI investigator since 2005. O’Shea is also a member of both the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
O’Shea is regarded as a leader in the fields of gene regulation, signal transduction, and systems biology. Her research focuses on the way cells sense changes in their environment and respond appropriately, work that has implications for understanding cancer and other diseases. Recent studies by O'Shea and her colleagues have shown that randomness in gene expression may lead to differences in cells—or perhaps even in people—that are genetically identical. Using yeast as their model, they found random noise affects gene expression in cells and that different promoters produce different amounts of noise.
For the last seven years, O’Shea has served as Director of the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences Center for Systems Biology, an interdisciplinary research center that brings together people from the physical and life sciences to solve problems in biology. She was recruited to Harvard in 2005 from the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), where she had been an HHMI investigator since 2000.
O’Shea continues to maintain a laboratory at Harvard University, where she is also a Paul C. Mangelsdorf Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology and Chemistry and Chemical Biology.
