Erin K. O'Shea

Erin K. O'Shea is an American biologist who 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. Early life and education Erin O'Shea is one of five children, born in Leroy, New York. O'Shea earned her AB in biochemistry from Smith College in 1988 and her PhD in chemistry from MIT in 1992 at age 26 working with Peter S. Kim studying leucine zippers. She was a postdoctoral fellow at University of California, Berkeley from 1992 to 1993. Career and research During her postdoctoral 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.