Shu-ou Shan

Biosketch

Shu-ou Shan, PhD, is Altair Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry in the Division of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at California Institute of Technology. She obtained her BSc in Chemistry & Biochemistry at the University of Maryland, College Park and her PhD in Biochemistry at Stanford University. She was a postdoctoral fellow in Biochemistry and Biophysics at UC San Francisco and joined the faculty at Caltech in 2005. Awards include the David and Lucille Packard Fellowship for science and engineering; Woman in Cell Biology junior award from the American Society of Cell Biology; Camille and Henry Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar award; Irving Sigal Young Investigator Award from the Protein Society; Nobel Laureate Signature Award from the American Chemical Society; Young Investigator Award from the American Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology; and the National Academy of Science Award in Molecular Biology.

Research Interests

Work in the Shan lab is driven by the fundamental curiosity to understand how the fidelity and organization of living cells arise from the self-assembly processes of inanimate biomolecules. Her current work aims to address two fundamental questions in protein biogenesis and homeostasis: How are nascent proteins selected into the appropriate biogenesis pathways as they emerge from the ribosome, and how does the cellular chaperone network protect aggregation-prone membrane/organellar proteins during their biogenesis? Her group integrates quantitative approaches in biochemistry, biophysics and mechanistic enzymology with structural and molecular cell biology to decipher the molecular basis of cellular pathways during protein biosynthesis, including folding, localization, modification and quality control. These systems serve as models to understand how accuracy is generated from noisy and degenerate molecular signals.