Paul Anderson md, phd

Austen Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School
Chief Academic Officer, Mass General Brigham


Paul Anderson, MD, PhD is the Austen Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and  serves as the Chief Academic Officer (CAO) at Mass General Brigham (MGB). He is also the Academic Dean at MGB for Harvard Medical School. 

As CAO at MGB, Anderson  manages an approximately $2.7B research enterprise. He oversees several key system-wide  departments at MGB, including Human Research Affairs, Clinical Trials Office, Research Management, Research IS Computing, Personalized Medicine, Gene and Cell Therapy Institute and Graduate Medical Education. He has earned an international  reputation in the area of post-transcriptional control of gene expression during stress  and inflammatory responses. 

Anderson discovered that a prion-related, low complexity domain in the RNA-binding protein TIA1 promotes a liquid phase transition leading to the assembly of  stress granule (SGs), a class of membraneless organelle that organizes cellular components and has been  implicated in the pathogenesis of neurodegenerative disease. His related discovery that angiogenin  (ANG)-induced tRNA fragments (tiRNAs) target the translation machinery to re-program gene expression and promote survival has been linked to motor neuron survival.