Dr. Patrick O’Donoghue is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Biochemistry at the University of Western Ontario who currently holds the Canada Research Chair in Chemical Biology and the Huntington Society of Canada Research Chair at the Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry. His research is focused on non-canonical amino acids, more specifically on the synthesis of abnormal enzymes for industrial and medical applications. 

In 2000, Patrick earned a degree in Biophysics, followed by a PhD in Chemistry in 2004, both from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, U.S. In 2006, he completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute for Genomic Biology at the University of Illinois, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale University where he was also a Research Associate until 2013. In 2013, Patrick joined the Departments of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Western University, where he is currently a tenured Associate Professor. He was also a Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Chemical Biology from 2014 to 2024.

Patrick’s publications with his trainees at Western have been recognized with major awards, including the prestigious 2021 Nucleic Acids Research Breakthrough Article award. His research was also highlighted in the Journal of Biological Chemistry Editor’s Picks in both 2020 and 2022.

Research in Patrick’s lab focuses on genetic code evolution and engineering with applications in synthetic biology and medicine. His lab develops methods for site-specific protein modification and delivery of human proteins to mammalian cells to elucidate the function of specific protein modifications in models of cancer and neurodegeneration. He also studies human transfer RNA (tRNA) variants in health and disease, and his lab develops tRNA therapeutics to correct or suppress the impact of genetic defects resulting from missense and nonsense mutations that are the molecular basis of many genetic diseases, including cancers, neurodegenerative, and neuromuscular disorders.