Announcement: Patrick O’Donoghue, PhD, appointed inaugural Huntington Society of Canada Research Chair
Patrick O’Donoghue, PhD
I am pleased to announce that Patrick O’Donoghue, PhD, has been appointed as the inaugural Huntington Society of Canada Research Chair at the Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry, Western University, effective November 1, 2024, to October 31, 2029.
With the goal to advance patient care outcomes and accelerate life-changing treatments, Western University and Huntington Society of Canada partnered together to create the prestigious endowed Huntington Society of Canada Research Chair – a first-of-its-kind in North America. The research chair aims to advance neurodegenerative research by focusing on innovative approaches to prevent, identify and treat Huntington's disease.
In 2000, Patrick earned a degree in Biophysics, followed by a PhD in Chemistry in 2004, both from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, U.S. In 2006, he completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute for Genomic Biology at the University of Illinois, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale University where he was also a Research Associate until 2013. In 2013, Patrick joined the Departments of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Western University, where he is currently a tenured Associate Professor. He was also a Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Chemical Biology from 2014 to 2024.
Patrick’s publications with his trainees at Western have been recognized with major awards, including the prestigious 2021 Nucleic Acids Research Breakthrough Article award. His research was also highlighted in the Journal of Biological Chemistry Editor’s Picks in both 2020 and 2022.
Research in Patrick’s lab focuses on genetic code evolution and engineering with applications in synthetic biology and medicine. His lab develops methods for site-specific protein modification and delivery of human proteins to mammalian cells to elucidate the function of specific protein modifications in models of cancer and neurodegeneration. He also studies human transfer RNA (tRNA) variants in health and disease, and his lab develops tRNA therapeutics to correct or suppress the impact of genetic defects resulting from missense and nonsense mutations that are the molecular basis of many genetic diseases, including cancers, neurodegenerative, and neuromuscular disorders.
The Huntington Society of Canada Research Chair serves as a unique opportunity to leverage Patrick’s current research program to identify novel nucleic acid-based therapeutics for Huntington’s disease.
Please join me in congratulating Patrick on his appointment as the inaugural Huntington Society of Canada Research Chair.
John Yoo, MD, FRCS(C), FACS
Dean, Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry
Western University
