Margaret (Peg) McCarthy 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. Following postdoctoral training at Rockefeller University and the NIH she joined he faculty of the University of Maryland School of Medicine in 1993. Dr. McCarthy is a Professor in the Departments of Physiology and Psychiatry. She was the Director of Graduate Education for the Program in Neuroscience and is currently an Associate Dean with responsibility for the Graduate Program in Life Sciences. In 2011 she became the Interim Chair of the Department of Pharmacology.
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. Dr. McCarthy has published over 120 peer-reviewed manuscripts on these topics and her research has been continuously funded by the NIH since 1994. She is currently an Editor at Endocrinology and Associate Editor at the Journal of Neuroscience. She was elected as a Councilor in the Organization for the Study of Sex Differences in 2009.