Margaret M McCarthy The International Congress of Neuroendocrinology 2014

Margaret M McCarthy

I received my PhD in Behavioral and Neural Sciences from the Institute of Animal Behavior at Rutgers University in Newark, NJ in 1989. I then spent three years as a post-doctoral fellow at the Rockefeller University in New York, NY and one year as a National Research Council Fellow at the National Institutes of Health, before joining the faculty at the University of Maryland. I am a member of the University of Maryland Graduate School and the Center for Studies in Reproduction I am also a member of the Society for Behavioral Neuroendocrinology, the Society for Neuroscience, the American Physiological Association and the Endocrine Society. My research program focuses on the influence of steroid hormones on the developing brain. During perinatal life, there is a sensitive period for hormone exposure during which permanent cytoarchitechtural changes are established. Males and females are exposed to different hormonal milieus and this results in sex differences in the brain. These differences include alterations in the volumes of particular brain nuclei and patterns of synaptic connectivity. The mechanisms by which sexually dimorphic structures are formed in the brain remains poorly understood.