Jen Sheen is a biologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and

Harvard Medical School Harvard Medical School (HMS) is the graduate medical school of Harvard University and is located in the Longwood Medical and Academic Area, Longwood Medical Area of Boston, Massachusetts. Founded in 1782, HMS is one of the oldest medical schools ...

who is known for her work on plant signaling networks. She is an elected member of the

American Association for the Advancement of Science The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is an American international non-profit organization with the stated goals of promoting cooperation among scientists, defending scientific freedom, encouraging scientific responsi ...

Education and career

Sheen's interest in plants followed her childhood on a sugarcane plantation in rural Taiwan. She has a B.S. from

National Taiwan University National Taiwan University (NTU; ) is a public research university in Taipei, Taiwan. The university was founded in 1928 during Taiwan under Japanese rule, Japanese rule as the seventh of the Imperial Universities. It was named Taihoku Imper ...

(1980) and earned a Ph.D. in 1986 from

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of high ...

where she worked with

Lawrence Bogorad Lawrence Bogorad (29 August 1921 – 28 December 2003) was an American botanist, pioneer of photosynthesis research and President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Scienc ...

. Following her Ph.D., she received endowment funds that enabled her to start her own lab at

in 1987 with flexibility that enabled her to define her own research path. She was promoted to professor of genetics in 2005. Concurrently she has held positions in molecular biology at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Research

Sheen is known for her research using plants as model systems to study

cell signaling In biology, cell signaling (cell signalling in British English) or cell communication is the ability of a cell to receive, process, and transmit signals with its environment and with itself. Cell signaling is a fundamental property of all cellula ...

. While a graduate student at Harvard University, she worked on the genetic system of

maize Maize ( ; ''Zea mays'' subsp. ''mays'', from es, maíz after tnq, mahiz), also known as corn ( North American and Australian English), is a cereal grain first domesticated by indigenous peoples in southern Mexico about 10,000 years ago. ...

with the goal of increasing crop yields. When starting her own lab, she established a model system using plant protoplasts, cells which can be maintained easily in laboratory containers. She then shifted her work to studying protoplasts in ''

Arabidopsis ''Arabidopsis'' (rockcress) is a genus in the family Brassicaceae. They are small flowering plants related to cabbage and mustard. This genus is of great interest since it contains thale cress (''Arabidopsis thaliana''), one of the model org ...

'', a plant commonly used as a model system, and Sheen has developed the use of

green fluorescent protein The green fluorescent protein (GFP) is a protein that exhibits bright green fluorescence when exposed to light in the blue to ultraviolet range. The label ''GFP'' traditionally refers to the protein first isolated from the jellyfish '' Aeq ...

in higher plant research. Sheen has used the plant protoplast model system to examine

innate immunity The innate, or nonspecific, immune system is one of the two main immunity strategies (the other being the adaptive immune system) in vertebrates. The innate immune system is an older evolutionary defense strategy, relatively speaking, and is th ...

, taking advantage of the plant system's ability to provide answers about innate immunity more rapidly than other systems in use. Sheen's research includes investigations into signaling pathways in plants, and has determined how plants sense sugars, and how stressors such as hydrogen peroxide are sensed by plants.

Selected publications

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Awards and honors

Sheen was elected a fellow of the

in 2009. In 2013, she received the Martin Gibbs Medal from the American Society of Plant Biologists who acknowledge Sheen for "her seminal and innovative contributions to the understanding of molecular mechanisms underlying the plant signal transduction cascades that mediate nutrient, hormone, and environmental stress responses and pathogen defenses in plants".

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Sheen, Jen Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science Harvard University faculty National Taiwan University alumni Harvard University alumni 21st-century American botanists American women geneticists Living people 21st-century American women scientists Year of birth missing (living people)