McGee-Lawrence named chair of MCG Department of Cellular Biology and Anatomy

Meghan McGee-Lawrence, PhD, a biomedical engineer and National Institutes of Health-funded investigator, has been named chair of the Department of Cellular Biology and Anatomy at the Medical College of Georgia at Augusta University, effective Oct. 1.

McGee-Lawrence has been serving as interim chair since March. In just six months, she has recruited two new educator-track faculty; launched a search for two new research-track faculty; overseen a significant renovation of the audiovisual system in the university’s gross anatomy lab; and initiated the creation of a Graduate Certificate in Anatomy program to offer further training for anatomical science educators, which is aiming for launch in the summer of 2026.

“Dr. McGee-Lawrence certainly stepped in and stepped up as interim chair, so when we began looking for someone to lead the department on a permanent basis, her well demonstrated leadership made her a natural choice,” said MCG Dean David C. Hess, MD. “She is a well-funded, well-published and successful investigator in her own right. But perhaps even more importantly, she places tremendous value on mentorship and collaboration and believes what a group of investigators can achieve together is so much better than what one scientist can do alone. I am excited to continue working with her to accomplish MCG’s research and education goals.”

McGee-Lawrence, who studies bone and muscle mass, especially in the face of aging and disease, came to MCG in 2014 after completing a five-year research fellowship in the Department of Orthopedic Surgery at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. Her interest in her field was piqued when she studied how hibernating bears can prevent loss of bone and muscle mass associated with disuse during their long periods of inactivity – something humans cannot do.

She is the principal investigator on a $2.4 million grant from the National Institute on Aging to study the crosstalk between bone, the adrenal glands, the muscle and fat in our bodies and how that changes as we age. She serves as a co-investigator on a five-year $11 million NIH Program Project grant to identify early, optimal points for novel interventions for age-related muscle loss, or sarcopenia, a major cause of falls, and subsequently bone fractures. She also is a contact principal investigator on a multi-PI NIH grant looking at mechanism of musculoskeletal frailty in HIV.

McGee-Lawrence is a standing member of the NIH’s Skeletal Biology Development and Disease Study Section; serves on the leadership team of the American Society for Bone and Mineral Research’s (ASBMR) Aging Working Group; and chairs the Orthopaedic Research Society’s CyPres Transformational Idea Virtual Platform Pillar Task Force. She is a member of the ASBMR’s Advocacy and Science Policy Committee and is an ambassador for the Bone Health and Osteoporosis Foundation. She also serves on the editorial boards for Bone Reports and JBMR Plus.

An honored researcher and educator, McGee-Lawrence received this year’s Outstanding Mentorship Award from AU’s Student Training and Research (STAR) Program. She is a past recipient of Outstanding Faculty, Distinguished Mentor and Distinguished Teaching Awards from The Graduate School, as well as an Exemplary Teaching Award and the Young Basic Science Faculty Award from MCG.

She earned her bachelor’s and doctoral degrees in biomedical engineering from Michigan Technological University in Houghton, Michigan.