January 16, 2020 @ 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
Free- This event has passed.
Come hear how OHSU’s research and innovation landscape has changed.
About this Event
OHSU has undergone significant changes at the leadership level in recent years. Among those changes, Peter Barr-Gillespie was named as OHSU’s chief research officer, and he has restructured his office, now named OHSU Research and Innovation. In addition, in response to an external review of the innovation landscape at OHSU, he launched a new office, OHSU Collaborations and Entrepreneurship, which is headed by Aditi Martin. One of Martin’s principal goal is to ensure that business development activities at OHSU, which occur in several offices in different units, are coordinated across the university. OHSU Technology Transfer, led by Andrew Watson, remains relatively unchanged from its structure within the former Technology Transfer and Businses Development (TTBD) office.
Barr-Gillespie will discuss these changes to OHSU’s research and innovation landscape, and review OHSU’s yearlong strategic planning process. He will be joined by Martin and Watson, who will elaborate on the new structure for technology transfer, collaborations, and entrepreneurship.
About the speaker
Peter G. Barr-Gillespie , PhD – Chief Research Officer and Executive Vice President Peter G. Barr-Gillespie, Ph.D., is a professor in the department of otolaryngology, an affiliated scientist with the Vollum Institute, and the chief research officer and executive vice president for OHSU. He is also the scientific director of the Hearing Restoration Project, funded by the Hearing Health Foundation.
Barr-Gillespie received his BA in Chemistry from Reed College in 1981, and his PhD in Pharmacology from the University of Washington in 1988. He spent five years as a postdoctoral fellow with Jim Hudspeth, PhD, first at the University of California San Francisco, and then at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. In 1993, he started his independent research program at Johns Hopkins University, in the Department of Physiology. He moved to OHSU in 1999, achieving the rank of professor in 2003. He was the associate vice president for basic research from 2014-2017, the interim senior vice president for research from 2017-2018, and was appointed chief research officer and executive vice president in 2019.
Barr-Gillespie oversees the research mission at OHSU, which exceeded $486 million during the 2019 fiscal year and includes the entire spectrum of science, from molecules to populations. His role is to provide research infrastructure and support, from fiscal management to shared instrumentation to long-term strategy. He also oversees nine of OHSU’s research centers and institutes, including the Vollum Institute, the Oregon National Primate Research Center, the Vaccine and Gene Therapy Institute, and the Advanced Imaging Research Center.
Barr-Gillespie has an active, well-funded basic science research program, the goal of which is to understand how the sensory cells of the inner ear, hair cells, detect mechanical signals like sound and head movements. The lab’s approach is molecular, and addresses two of the most important questions in the field. First, what is the molecular mechanism for mechanotransduction? And second, how does the hair cell assemble the hair bundle so that its multiple levels of organization are produced and maintained? His research program continues during his tenure as a senior administrator at OHSU.