Joan-Emma Shea | |
---|---|
Born | 1972 (age 51–52) |
Alma mater |
McGill University Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
Scientific career | |
Institutions | University of California, San Diego |
Thesis | Brownian motion in a non-equilibrium bath (1997) |
Joan-Emma Shea is an American chemist who is a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research applies statistical and computational approaches to address biological problems. She is a Fellow of both the American Physical Society and the American Chemical Society, and the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Physical Chemistry.
Shea was born in Santa Barbara, California. [1] She was an undergraduate student at McGill University and a doctoral student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where her research considered Brownian motion. [2] She was awarded a National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada fellowship, and joined Charles L. Brooks III at the University of California, San Diego and Scripps Research. [1]
Shea joined the James Franck Institute at the University of Chicago in 2000, where she spent one year before joining the University of California, Santa Barbara. [3] [4] She became a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2008. Her work considers the chemistry of cellular processes, including in vivo protein folding. [5] In particular, She studies intrinsically disordered proteins, biomolecules which do not fold to a single, 3D shape, but instead rapidly interconvert between many conformations in their monomeric forms. Some intrinsically disordered proteins can self-assemble into fibrillar aggregates and/or undergo a process called liquid-liquid phase separation. Shea studies these processes using computational and statistical approaches [6]
In 2019, Shea was elected as editor-in-chief of the Journal of Physical Chemistry (A, B and C). She was the first woman to hold this position in the 124-year history of the journal. [7]
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