Bio:

Clodagh O’Shea is the Wicklow Capital Endowed Chair and a Professor of Molecular and Cell Biology at the Salk Institute as well as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Faculty Scholar. Her research integrates cancer biology, systems virology, structural biology, multi-modal imaging, synthetic biology and genomics to reveal critical growth regulatory targets and translate this knowledge into precision medicines. Her work has revealed the profound overlap between the cellular networks and targets disrupted in viral and cancer replication, which she is exploiting to design synthetic viral vectors, vaccines and cancer therapies. Her team has also developed disruptive new genome assembly and imaging technologies, such as Adsembly and ChromEMT. ChromEMT enables chromatin structure and 3D organization to be reconstructed  at nucleosome resolutions and megabase scales, which has revealed fundamental new insights into genome structure-function in the nucleus. Dr. O’Shea received her Bachelor’s degree in Biochemistry from the University College Cork and her Ph.D. in Immunology at the I.C.R.F. in London. She was a HFSP fellow in Dr. Frank McCormick’s laboratory at the UCSF Cancer Center where she worked on the prototype for oncolytic viral therapy. She has received numerous awards for her research, including the Beckman Young Investigator Award, the Sontag Distinguished Scientist Award, the American Cancer & Gene Therapy Young Investigator Award, Kavli Frontiers Fellow, and the W.M. Keck Medical Research Award.