Dr. Meghan McCarthy Program Lead
3D Printing and Biovisualization
Computational Biology
NIH/NIAID
Meghan McCarthy, M.S., Ph.D., is Program Lead for 3D Printing and Biovisualization in the Office of Cyber Infrastructure and Computational Biology at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). Her work encompasses a range of projects related to development and adoption of 3D printing and VR/AR for bioscientific and medical applications, including enhanced 3D visualization of molecular models, medical imaging data, and large-scale, multidimensional datasets.
To further these efforts, Dr. McCarthy led the launch of NIAID’s Biovisualization Lab in 2018. The “BioViz Lab” is a central resource providing VR/AR hardware and software, technical support, and scientific consultation to NIAID researchers and staff. Dr. McCarthy is also a co-founder and current lead for the NIH 3D Print Exchange (3dprint.nih.gov), a community-driven, online portal to discover, share, and create 3D models related to bioscience and medicine. Additional projects in her program portfolio include development and integration of tools and features for mobile and browser-based 3D visualization.
Given her passion for all things “3D,” Dr. McCarthy contributes to efforts focused on improving 3D (meta)data standards, file format adoption, and best practices to better support new and emerging applications for 3D data. She is a member of working groups led by the Web3D Consortium, the Radiological Society of North America, the DICOM standard, and the Creative Commons Organization.
Dr. McCarthy was honored as a Hive Innovator at TEDMED 2016 and in the Washington, D.C., Women in Technology Leadership Awards in 2018. In 2015 she was included in FedScoop’s list of the “13 Coolest Jobs in Government.”
In addition to her peer reviewed publications, Dr. McCarthy has been featured on podcasts and at popular science events. Her outreach work includes participation in Maker Faires, STEM programs, and career events promoting women in science. Dr. McCarthy holds a B.S. in Biology from Virginia Tech, and an M.S. in Biotechnology and a Ph.D. in Biochemistry from University College Cork, Ireland. Her graduate work was focused on cell signaling dysfunction in Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease.