John J. O'Shea

John O’Shea is a Senior Investigator and Chief of the Molecular Immunology and Inflammation Branch at the NIH's National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases (NIAMS). He served as the NIAMS Scientific Director of Intramural Research for twenty years, from 2005 until 2025. He also served as the Acting Director of the NIH Center for Regenerative Medicine from 2009-2011 and is an adjunct Professor in the Department of Pathology at the University of Pennsylvania.

His own area of scientific interest is cytokine signal transduction, dissecting the role of Jaks and Stats family transcription in immunoregulation. O'Shea and his colleagues cloned the tyrosine kinase, Jak3, and demonstrated its role in pathogenesis of severe combined immunodeficiency. O’Shea is the author of more than 350 publications and has been elected as a member of the National Academy of Medicine and the National Academy of Sciences, as well as the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

O’Shea received his M.D. from the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, and trained in Internal Medicine at the SUNY Upstate Medical Center in Syracuse. He came to the NIH as a fellow at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and also worked at the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. He also served as a Commissioned Officer in the U.S. Public Health Service, started his own research group at the National Cancer Institute in 1989, and then moved to NIAMS in 1994.