Paula Cannon, Ph.D. is a professor of molecular microbiology and immunology at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California. She leads a research team that studies viruses, stem cells, and gene therapy, with an emphasis on HIV/AIDS.
Cannon earned a Ph.D. from the University of Liverpool in the U.K. and did post-doctoral training at Harvard and Oxford. In addition to her position at USC, she has held faculty positions at Uniformed Services University and Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. These positions provided her with opportunities to study highly pathogenic viruses of military significance and the therapeutic potential of bone marrow hematopoietic stem cells (HSC). Together, they shaped her current research program on the use of virus-based gene therapy vectors to engineer human HSC.
Cannon’s research is funded by several foundations, the National Institutes of Health, and the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine.
