Erin K. O'Shea

Erin K. O'Shea
Erin O'Shea, Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI)
Nationality	American
Fields	Biochemistry
Institutions	Harvard University, HHMI
Alma mater	Smith College, MIT, UCSF
Doctoral advisor	Peter S. Kim
Other academic advisors	Robert Tjian, Ira Herskowitz
Notable awards	NAS Award in Molecular Biology (2001)

Erin K. O'Shea Ph.D. is President of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI). In 2013, she was named HHMI's Vice President and Chief Scientific Officer. Prior to that, she was a Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology and Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard University. In 2016, her appointment as future, and first woman, President of HHMI was announced. She has been a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investigator since 2000.

Erin O'Shea is one of five children, born in Leroy, New York.

O'Shea earned her A.B. in Biochemistry from Smith College in 1988 and her Ph.D. in Chemistry from MIT in 1992 at age 26 working with Peter S. Kim studying leucine zippers. She was a post doctoral fellow at University of California, Berkeley from 1992 to 1993.

During her post doctoral fellowship, O'Shea worked 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 (TAP)-tags.

After her PhD, O'Shea was briefly a Basic Research Fellow before joining the faculty of University of California, San Francisco as an assistant professor in 1993.