Karen Mossman, PhD, is a Professor in the Department of Medicine, former Chair of the Department of Biochemistry & Biomedical Sciences and former Vice President Research at McMaster University, Canada. She completed her undergraduate Honors BSc in Molecular Biology and Genetics from the University of Guelph in 1992, her Ph.D. in Biochemistry in 1997 and her Post-doctoral Fellowship in Molecular Microbiology and Immunology in 2001, both at the University of Alberta. Dr. Mossman is a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences and was recognized by the Women’s Executive Network as a Top 100 – Canada’s Most Powerful Women. Dr. Mossman has published over 150 peer-reviewed scientific publications and has contributed as author and editor to numerous books, including virology textbooks.
Dr. Mossman joined McMaster University in July of 2001, with a research focus on understanding the interactions between viruses and their hosts, both in normal healthy cells and in cancer cells, with the goal of developing novel therapy approaches for emerging viral infections and cancer. These studies of virus-host interactions led to the development of herpesvirus-based oncolytic viruses for cancer immunotherapy. She is currently working with industry to develop Bovine herpesvirus type I as a clinical oncolytic virus vector. More recently, her group helped isolate SARS-CoV-2 from Canadian patients and is actively working on COVID-related studies. To better understand future pandemics, Dr. Mossman’s lab also studies bats and why bats are able to host a wide variety of viruses without getting sick.
