Erin E. McClelland, Ph.D.

Biography

Dr. Erin McClelland received a Bachelor of Arts in Aquatic Biology from the University of California, Santa Barbara and a Ph.D. in Biology under Dr. Wayne Potts from the University of Utah. She completed postdoctoral training under Dr. Arturo Casadevall at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. She was founding faculty at the Commonwealth Medical College in Scranton, Pennsylvania, where she taught Immunology for four years. She then joined the faculty at Middle Tennessee State University where she taught microbiology and biotechnology. She is excited to join the faculty at MU-COM to teach Immunology to first- and second-year medical students.

Dr. McClelland comes from a family of teachers and taught both in graduate school and during postdoctoral training, which prepared her for teaching and mentoring students. She is passionate about training students in research, including how to think critically and present their research. Dr. McClelland has mentored >20 undergraduate and graduate students, all of whom have successfully moved on to post-graduate school or postdoctoral training.

Dr. McClelland is a member of the American Association of Immunology and the American Society of Microbiology. She was the KY-TN ASM Branch President from 2018-21. She and her colleagues at MTSU were awarded an NIH R15 grant in 2018 to study how intracellular Cryptococcus neoformans modulates macrophage polarization. The initial results were published in 2020 in PLoS One and the grant is currently submitted for renewal.

Dr. McClelland’s research interests encompass understanding host-pathogen interactions of the pathogenic yeast, Cryptococcus neoformans, including at the level of macrophage polarization and the sex of the host, to try to understand why 70 percent of patients with cryptococcosis are male.