Maureen Ferran earned her M.S. and Ph.D. in Genetics from the University of Connecticut, where she studied how viruses evade the host innate immune response. She then went to the Laboratory of Viral Genetics within the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease at the National Institutes of Health, where she studied human papillomavirus.
She is now an associate professor in the Thomas H. Gosnell School of Life Sciences at the Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester NY where she teaches courses including Virology, Infectious Disease: Impact on Society and Culture, and Eukaryotic Gene Regulation and Disease.
Her research lab focuses on the development of viruses as a cancer therapy and as a molecular tool to understand innate immunity and age-related diseases. Studies in her lab also investigate the use of imaging agents to detect and target breast cancer.
