Pat Sheehan, Ph.D.

Postdoctoral Associate

I graduated from Clarion University of Pennsylvania in 2016 with a degree in Molecular Biology/Biotechnology.  In my undergrad years, I worked in an immunology lab where we focused on developing novel antibodies to pathogenic fungi.  After graduating, I did a year-long postbac at the NIH in the lab of Dr. Susan Pierce working with Dr. Munir Akkaya (now a professor at OSU).  In the Pierce lab, the majority of my research focused on B cell development and how the immune system responds to malaria.  In 2017, I started my Ph.D in neuroscience at Washington University in St. Louis in the lab of Dr. Erik Musiek where we worked on understanding the link between circadian rhythms and neurodegeneration.  I had two main projects that I focused on in the Musiek lab.  In the first, we found that loss of a circadian transcription factor in astrocytes induced a reactive phenotype that was capable of degrading intra-neuronal protein aggregates.  In the second project, we worked on defining the circadian transcriptome of astrocytes and microglia.  Here we found that rhythmically expressed genes could be reprogrammed to gain or lose rhythms in the setting of Alzheimer’s disease pathology or in the context of normal aging.  I joined Dr. Schafer’s lab as a Postdoc in September 2022 where I will focus on understanding complement signaling in glia.