Clare O'Connor: Lead Editor

Clare O'Connor is an Associate Professor in the Biology Department at Boston College. Clare received her B.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Purdue University. She was a postdoctoral fellow at Caltech and UCLA before becoming a faculty member at the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology (now part of the University of Massachusetts Medical School) in 1984. Clare joined the Biology Department at Boston College in 1995. From 2002-2003, she served as a Program Director at the National Science Foundation. Clare's research focuses on protein repair mechanisms, and her laboratory has developed genetic models in yeast and Drosophila that they use to address the significance of protein repair in aging and stress. Her research has been supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. Clare is the author of 38 peer-reviewed publications and 5 book chapters.

Clare has taught courses in genetics, cell biology, and biochemistry at both the undergraduate and graduate level. She currently teaches introductory genetics classes to both biology majors and non-majors as part of the university core curriculum. She also teaches laboratory courses that involve undergraduate students in functional genomics research as part of a curriculum project funded by the National Science Foundation. She has received several awards from Boston College for the innovative use of technology in undergraduate teaching.