Professor O’Neil

Office: HA22

Prof. Alison O’Neil received her B.S. while doing proteomics research with Prof. Anna Tan-Wilson at Binghamton University. She then went on to join the Research and Development Team at LigoCyte Pharmaceuticals (now Takeda Vaccine) working on a virus-like particle platform vaccine for Norovirus.

In 2008, she joined the Chemistry and Biochemistry department at Montana State University and earned her PhD under Prof. Trevor Douglas. At MSU, she was awarded the Graduate Excellence award for the class of 2013.  Her PhD research exploited the self-assembling properties of bacteriophage P22 to engineer nanomaterials.

During her post-doctoral studies, Dr. O’Neil worked on modeling and understanding neurodegenerative diseases using human stem cells at Harvard University and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. This work included projects involving Parkinson’s disease, ALS, and schizophrenia. While at Harvard, she authored collaborative work with Google, Vertex, and Biogen Idec.

Joining Wesleyan in the summer of 2018, her research combines her love of biochemistry and stem cell training by investigating the role of protein aggregates in the progress of neurodegeneration.