Internationally accomplished biomedical scientist, scholar to lead OHSU’s $462 million research enterprise
Peter Barr-Gillespie, Ph.D., will be OHSU’s first chief research officer and executive vice president, effective Jan. 1, 2019. Barr-Gillespie has served as interim senior vice president for research at OHSU since 2017.
In his new role, Barr-Gillespie will be principal adviser to OHSU President Danny Jacobs, M.D., M.P.H., F.A.C.S., on research strategy and research resource allocation. He will lead and manage OHSU’s research enterprise -- comprising dozens of internationally and nationally acclaimed basic, translational, clinical and public health research programs -- and serve on the president’s executive leadership team.
“Dr. Barr-Gillespie has done a tremendous job leading the OHSU research mission on an interim basis. I’m delighted to appoint him to a new, permanent position that reflects his contributions and capabilities as well as the vital role of research at OHSU,” said Jacobs.
Barr-Gillespie also will collaborate with external academic, industrial and community research partners, and the various funding, regulatory and accrediting bodies. Moreover, he will represent OHSU in research collaborations with other universities in Oregon and the northwest region.
“I am excited to support Dr. Jacobs in developing OHSU’s 2025 strategic plan for research,” said Barr-Gillespie. “To be among the top-ranked research universities for NIH funding in the country and maintain our national reputation for cutting-edge research, we need to empower our researchers to do their best science by smartly investing in people, core resources, and space, and enhancing our graduate programs.”
Barr-Gillespie is an internationally recognized scholar, biomedical researcher and visionary academic leader who has been on faculty at OHSU since 1999. He currently holds faculty appointments in the departments of Otolaryngology/Head and Neck Surgery, Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, and Cell and Developmental Biology in OHSU’s School of Medicine and Oregon Hearing Research Center. He also is a senior scientist in the OHSU Vollum Institute.
An NIH-funded investigator, Barr-Gillespie’s research focus, his passion, is understanding the molecular mechanisms that enable our sense of hearing. Specifically, the Barr-Gillespie lab endeavors to determine how sensory cells in the inner ear called hair cells allow humans to perceive sound arising from the outside world. Barr-Gillespie will maintain his active research program while serving as chief research officer.
Barr-Gillespie is also the scientific director of the Hearing Restoration Project, or HRP, an international consortium of 14 investigators funded by the Hearing Health Foundation. The HRP’s goal is to develop a biological therapy for hearing loss arising from destruction of hair cells, which are not regenerated after damage from noise, ototoxic drug, or aging.
Barr-Gillespie earned his bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Reed College in 1981, carrying out his senior undergraduate thesis at OHSU after a summer fellowship in OHSU’s biochemistry department. He received his doctorate in pharmacology at the University of Washington in 1988, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in physiology, cell biology and neuroscience with Jim Hudspeth, M.D., Ph.D., at the University of California San Francisco and the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in 1993.
Following his fellowship, he accepted a faculty position in physiology at Johns Hopkins and remained there until accepting the position of scientist at the OHSU Vollum Institute and associate professor of otolaryngology/head and neck surgery in the OHSU School of Medicine in 1999. In 2014, Barr-Gillespie was appointed associate vice president for basic research at OHSU.
As a young investigator, Barr-Gillespie was named a Pew Scholar in Biomedical Sciences, a program that funds research “that shows outstanding promise in science relevant to the advancement of human health.” During his tenure at OHSU, he has been honored with the Faculty Excellence in Education Award and the John A. Resko Faculty Research Achievement and Mentoring Award.
Over his distinguished career, he has published more than 115 scholarly articles, chapters and reviews, and has been an invited lecturer at dozens of research universities, academic conferences and scientific events.
Barr-Gillespie and his wife, Ann Barr-Gillespie, D.P.T., Ph.D., live in Portland. She is the vice provost and executive dean of the College of Health Professions at the Pacific University Hillsboro campus. Their kids are Aidan Gillespie, 17, and Katie Gillespie, 24, whom Peter and Ann share with their mother, Susan Gillespie. In their spare time, Peter and Ann enjoy cycling and hiking.