Erin K. O'Shea Ph.D. is the Vice President and Chief Scientific Officer of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and a Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology and Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard University. She earned her A.B. in Biochemistry from Smith College in 1988 and her Ph.D. in Chemistry from MIT in a short two and a half years working with Peter S. Kim studying leucine zippers. Because of her success, she was immediately offered a faculty position at the University of California, San Francisco. During her early years, she worked as a postdoc with Robert Tjian and Ira Herskowitz studying chromatin regulation of transcription in yeast. When she was joined by her graduate school colleague Jonathan Weissman, they began to determine the location and abundance of all of the proteins in the yeast genome. They ultimately made two libraries both with GFP-fused protein with tandem affinity purification-tags. In 2005, she was recruited to Harvard University to be the director of the Center for Systems Biology and a Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology and Chemistry and Chemical Biology. Her research is focused on gene regulation and the biology of a three-protein circadian clock. In 2012, she was elected to be HHMI's new Vice President and Chief Scientific Officer leading the HHMI Investigator Program succeeding Jack Dixon. She will continue to maintain her lab at Harvard.
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