ROLE

As a Senior Director - Scientific Officer, Shan Sockanathan collaborates in administering the HHMI Investigator Program and liaises with HHMI Investigators, their laboratories, and the host institution. Sockanathan’s host site assignments can be found here.

BIO

Sockanathan joined HHMI in 2025, coming from Johns Hopkins University, where she serves as a professor of neuroscience. Sockanathan studies the mechanistic control of cellular differentiation and survival in the developing and adult nervous system. Her recent work explores pathways that preserve neuronal survival in the adult nervous system and investigates how their dysfunction contributes to neurodegenerative disease.

Sockanathan earned a bachelor’s degree in science in 1986, from Imperial College of Science and Technology, and a PhD in molecular biology in 1991 from Cambridge University. She completed her postdoctoral training at the National Institute of Medical Research in London and Columbia University in New York before joining the faculty of Johns Hopkins University in 2002, where she also served as the Vice Chair of Faculty in the Department of Neuroscience.