Paula Cannon, PhD

President

Paula Cannon, PhD, is a Distinguished Professor of Microbiology and Immunology at the Keck School of Medicine of USC. She leads a research group that studies how gene and cell therapies could be used to target HIV, cancer and other chronic diseases.

Dr. Cannon obtained her PhD from the University of Liverpool in the United Kingdom and received postdoctoral training at both Oxford and Harvard universities. She has a long-standing interest in gene therapy as a clinical approach to treating HIV infection, and her early work in this area demonstrated that gene editing of the viral co-receptor, CCR5, in hematopoietic stem cells could be used to create an HIV-resistant immune system. More recently her lab has focused on modifying B cells to express custom antibodies and other therapeutic protein cargoes, and approaches for in vivo gene editing. Dr. Cannon is the principal investigator on several large multi-institution NIH grants and enjoys collaborating with teams of scientists in these areas.