Erin O'Shea

Erin O’Shea is the first woman and the sixth president to lead the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (appointed 2016).  Before becoming President, she served as HHMI’s Vice President and Chief Scientific Officer for three years.

A renowned biologist and former faculty member at Harvard University and the University of California, San Francisco, O’Shea is a leader in the fields of gene regulation, signal transduction, and systems biology whose studies of circadian clocks and the mechanisms by which cells process information have received international recognition.  She continues to pursue her research and support the next generation of scientists in her lab at HHMI’s Janelia Research Campus.

She received a PhD in chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Bachelor of Science in biochemistry from Smith College.  She was appointed as an HHMI investigator in 2000, before moving to Harvard in 2005.

Erin is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Microbiology and the European Molecular Biology Organisation (associate member) and has received numerous awards including the National Academy of Sciences Award in Molecular Biology (2001) and the Living Legends Award for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (2022).