Shane V. Hegarty PhD

Dr. Shane Hegarty is Chief Scientific Officer, Co-Founder, and IP Co-Inventor at AXONIS Therapeutics, a seed-stage, Boston-based biotechnology company. He has >12 years of experience leading cutting-edge, award-winning neuro-protection, -modulation, and -regeneration research for neurological disorders. In recent years, Shane has completed a number of competitive biotech entrepreneurial programs, such as Creative Destruction Labs and Harvard I-Labs. As a Research Fellow in Professor Zhigang He’s lab at Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School.

Dr. Hegarty led a genome-wide AAV-CRISPR screen for neuroprotection and -regeneration in vivo. Before moving to the US, he was a Faculty Member in the Neuroscience Department of University College Cork, Ireland, and received the prestigious Neuroscience Ireland Investigator Award in 2016. A highly productive researcher with 29 research papers (22 as first/senior author), >1,000 citations and h-index = 15, and serial grant awardee. Dr. Hegarty has acted as an Editor for Frontiers and The Biochemist, and an expert reviewer for a number of esteemed journals and international funding agencies. He is an experienced university lecturer, research supervisor, and mentor, who also graduated top of his Neuroscience BSc class.