Neuroscience Day 2016 will take place at University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH on May 6, 2016. Dr. Margaret M. McCarthy will be the keynote speaker. Dr. McCarthy is a
professor and Chair in the Department of Pharmacology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. She received a BA and MA in Biology from the University of Missouri – Columbia and a PhD from the Institute of Animal Behavior at Rutgers University, Newark NJ. Dr. McCarthy received her postdoctoral training at Rockefeller University from 1989 to 1992 and spent one year at NIH as a National Research Council Fellow. She joined the faculty of the University Of Maryland School Of Medicine in 1993 and was a professor in the Department of Physiology for 18 years before becoming the Chair of the Department of Pharmacology in 2011. She continues to hold secondary appointments in the Departments of Physiology and Psychiatry. She was the Director of Graduate Education for the Program in Neuroscience from 2002 – 2005 after which she served as an Associate Dean with responsibility for the Graduate Program in Life Sciences which oversees the training of 400 MS and PhD students and 350 postdoctoral fellows. She has received numerous awards and recognition for her mentoring of graduate students.
Dr. McCarthy has a long standing interest in the cellular mechanisms establishing sex differences in the brain. She uses a combined behavioral and mechanistic approach in the laboratory rat to understand both normal brain development and how these processes might go selectively awry in males versus females. She has published over 170 peer-reviewed manuscripts on these topics. Her research has been continuously funded by the NIH since 1994 and that same year she received the Frank A. Beach Award in Behavioral Neuroendocrinology. Dr. McCarthy now stands among the country’s most pre-eminent scientific investigators, advising the NIH on guidelines governing a new policy, which states that sex must be accounted for, controlled for, and incorporated into all preclinical research funded by NIH, one of the agency’s most sweeping research policy shifts in more than a decade. She is a previous Editor at Endocrinology and is currently an Associate Editor at the Journal of Neuroscience and on the Advisory Board for eNeuro. She is a former Associate Editor of Hormones and Behavior, past Secretary of the Society for Behavioral Neuroendocrinology, President-elect of the Organization for the Study of Sex Differences and was named one of Maryland’s Top 100 Women in 2009. In 2015, Dr. McCarthy was awarded Researcher of the Year by the University of Maryland for her cumulative accomplishments and contributions to the university.
More info on Dr. McCarthy’s research can be found here:
http://medschool.umaryland.edu/facultyresearchprofile/viewprofile.aspx?id=2774