Sex differences in the brain at the intersection of the nervous, immune and endocrine systems

Biography
Margaret (Peg) McCarthy received a PhD from the Institute of Animal Behavior at Rutgers University, Newark NJ, completed postdoctoral training at Rockefeller University in New York NY and was a National Research Council Fellow at NIH-NIAAA before joining the faculty of the University of Maryland School of Medicine in 1993 in Baltimore Maryland, USA. She was a Professor in the Department of Physiology before becoming the Chair of the Department of Pharmacology in 2011. 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 200 peer-reviewed manuscripts and has been cited close to 10,000 times. In addition to being Chair of the Department of Pharmacology, Margaret is the inaugural Director of the University of Maryland – Medicine Institute for Neuroscience Discovery (UM-MIND). She is a Reviewing Editor for Journal of Neuroscience and a fellow with AAAS and ACNP, former President of the Organization for the Study of Sex Differences and current President of the Society for Behavioral Neuroendocrinology.