Shobha Vasudevan

Senior Group Leader, Senior Principal Scientist II at A*STAR

Speaker

Dr. Shobha Vasudevan is a molecular RNA biologist with more than 25 years of expertise in post-transcriptional regulation, translation and cancer stress adaptation. She is Senior Group Leader and Director of Technology and Innovation at the Genome Institute of Singapore, A*STAR, and Associate Professor Adj at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Previously, she spent 16 years as an independent principal investigator at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital before taking on a directorial role at the Brown University RNA Center.

Dr. Vasudevan completed her doctorate in molecular genetics with Dr. Stuart Peltz at Rutgers University–UMDNJ, where she identified an mRNA-stability pathway activated by metabolic stress. During her postdoctoral training with Dr. Joan Steitz at Yale University, she uncovered the unexpected ability of microRNAs to activate, rather than only repress, translation in quiescent cells. She has authored or co-authored more than 28 peer-reviewed publications, including studies in Cell, Science, Molecular Cell, Nature Communications, Genome Biology and Science Advances. Her multidisciplinary research programmes have been supported by NIH R01, R21 and MIRA awards, as well as funding from the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, Cancer Research Institute, AACR, V Foundation and Leukemia Research Foundation. She has also trained numerous students and postdoctoral fellows who have progressed to academic and industry careers.

Her laboratory investigates how cancer cells reprogramme RNA regulation and translation to adapt to therapeutic stress, enter reversible quiescence and persist despite treatment. Her work has defined cell-state-specific mechanisms involving mRNAs, circular RNAs, RNA modifications, RNA–protein complexes and specialized ribosomes. By combining mechanistic RNA biology with genomics and therapeutic development—and by building collaborations across academia, clinical research and industry—her programme seeks to uncover vulnerabilities in refractory cancers and translate them into combination treatments and innovative circRNA and other RNA-based therapeutic platforms.