Margaret “Peg” M. McCarthy, PhD
James and Carolyn Frenkil Endowed Dean’s Professor and Chair, Department of Pharmacology
Director
University of Maryland -Medicine Institute for Neuroscience Discovery
University of Maryland School of Medicine
Margaret “Peg” McCarthy is a leading neuroscientist who has been with University of Maryland School of Medicine since 1993 and made significant discoveries related to gender differences and the brain.
Her seminal research focuses on the influence of steroid hormones on the developing brain with a special emphasis on understanding the cellular mechanisms that establish sex differences — i.e., the numerous, novel mechanisms by which steroids permanently organize the developing brain differently in males and females.
Dr. McCarthy conducted some of the first studies on how steroid hormones can imprint epigenetically on the developing brain to organize differences between males and females in adult physiology and behavior. More recently, her laboratory generated a paradigm shift in the understanding of sexual differentiation of sexual behavior with the discovery that the feminization program of development requires suppression of the masculinization program via DNA methylation, and that steroid hormones emancipate the male gene expression profile by reducing activity of DNA methylating enzymes.
McCarthy’s laboratory also has studied inflammatory and immune-mediated sex differences in the brain, sensitive periods in brain development, neurogenesis in the postnatal brain, and the role of GABA in brain differences.
McCarthy was named the University of Maryland, Baltimore’s (UMB) Researcher of the Year in 2015 and a UMB Champion of Excellence in 2017. She has been an associate editor of Hormones and Behavior since 2004 and served as associate editor of the Journal of Neuroscience ( 2007-2011) and editor of Endocrinology (2008-2013).
She earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in biology from the University of Missouri and her PhD in behavioral neuroscience from Rutgers University.
