Erin K. O'Shea, PhD, Professor and Vice Chair, Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics, and Associate Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, was elected yesterday (April 20) to the prestigious National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in recognition of her distinguished achievements in original research.

Dr. O'Shea has served as the founding chair of an outside scientific advisory board for the department of Genetics and Genomics at BUSM. She and other members attend a yearly department retreat and provide independent feedback on the department?s activities.

Election to the Academy is considered one of the highest honors that can be accorded a US scientist or engineer. Erin O'Shea's lab studies how cells monitor the environment and regulate their growth, work that has implications for understanding human cell growth in cancer and other diseases. Her research has contributed to an understanding of how the activity of regulatory proteins is controlled by phosphorylation, the nearly ubiquitous process by which small molecules called phosphates are attached to proteins in cells, allowing them to send signals and adapt to rapidly changing conditions. Recently, she has made pioneering advances in proteomics, publishing with a colleague the most comprehensive and detailed picture yet of protein activity in the living cells of higher organisms. They developed a set of powerful tools that allow researchers to look in unprecedented detail at the full complement of thousand of proteins acting and interacting in a living organism.