Associate Professor Katie McGhee Receives NSF Mid-Career Advancement Award
April 16, 2026
Associate Professor of Biology Katie McGhee has received a prestigious Mid-Career Advancement (MCA) Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF). She will receive $273,024 over three years from NSF’s Division of Integrative Organismal Systems.
The MCA Award is designed to support mid-career scientists in substantively enhancing and advancing their research program and career trajectory. It supports crucial training and the means to gain new skills to ensure long-term productivity and creativity. This is the first-ever MCA Award given to a Sewanee faculty member, and was the only one given to an institution in Tennessee this year.
McGhee is a behavioral ecologist whose lab studies how an individual’s early experiences, and even the experiences of their parents, shape their behavior later in life. With her MCA Award, titled “How do early competitive interactions affect the development of the stress response?” McGhee will examine whether competitive social interactions early in life carry over to affect how individuals cope with stressors later, both behaviorally and hormonally. Early competitive interactions can determine an individual’s early access to resources, their circulating stress hormone levels, and their eventual dominance rank. However, whether these early interactions alter development of the stress response and how individuals react to future stressors remains unknown.
To answer these questions, McGhee uses a model fish system (the mangrove rivulus) that is one of only two self-fertilizing hermaphroditic vertebrates in the world. Experimentally, this allows her to control for genetics and detect subtle environmental effects on behavior. Her grant will provide her with valuable training in measuring stress hormones and allow her to establish a set-up to measure hormones in her lab at Sewanee. This grant will also positively impact many undergraduate students in McGhee’s lab and classes through hands-on research and new course offerings in endocrinology.
"I am truly honored to be awarded the MCA," says McGhee. "Although this grant provides crucial training to me and equipment for measuring hormones, I will also be able to train students in these methods and expand the research opportunities available.”
