Roisin Owens's Biography

Roisin Owens, Associate Professor, Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Mines de St Etienne

Róisín Owens is an Associate Professor in the Department of Bioelectronics (BEL) at the Centre Microélectronique de Provence of the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Saint Etienne. She received her BA in Biochemistry at Trinity College Dublin, in Ireland, and her PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Southampton University in the U.K. She completed a 4 year postdoctoral fellowship with Professor David Russell in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at Cornell University, studying lipid metabolism of Mycobacterium tuberculosis. This was followed by a 1.5 year appointment at Agave BioSystems, a small biotechnology company in Ithaca, New York. There, Dr. Owens was involved in developing immunological and biochemical methods for the detection of cancers and pathogenic organisms. A newfound interest in coupling biological systems with engineering led her back to Cornell University but this time in the Department of Biomedical Engineering where she worked as a Research Associate in the laboratory of Dr. Moonsoo Jin, to engineer proteins for rhinovirus therapeutics, as well as the development of nanoparticles for in vivo targeting. She has a wide range of expertise in the areas of protein and lipid biochemistry, microbiology, molecular biology and immunology. She has received several awards including the European Research Council starting grant, a Marie Curie reintegration fellowship, and an EMBO fellowship.