Welcome to the McMurray Lab
Dr. McMurray has multi-faceted expertise and interests, working in several domains. These include clinical laboratory testing in immunogenetics, research in cancer biology, genomics and bioinformatics and teaching and advising graduate students in the School of Medicine and Dentistry.
In her clinical work, Dr. McMurray is part of the HLA / Tissue Typing laboratory, which plays a critical role in solid organ and stem cell transplantation, providing the genetic and immunologic testing necessary to match donors and recipients in need of a transplant. Under the mentorship of Dr. Myra Coppage, Dr. McMurray is working towards certification as a clinical laboratory director through the American Society for Histocompatibility and Immunogenetics and the New York State Department of Health.
In her research work, Dr. McMurray is actively engaged in collaborative cancer genomics and informatics projects with Dr. Hartmut Land, Dr. Matthew McCall and Dr. Mark Noble. Dr. McMurray is applying genomics and systems biological approaches to identify critical differences in the gene regulatory architecture of primary and metastatic cancer cells. This work focuses on a set of molecules that control tumor formation capacity of cancer cells, known as ‘cooperation response genes’ (CRGs), discovered a decade ago by Drs. Land and McMurray. Ongoing studies test the role of CRGs in a number of human cancers, as well as interrogating the gene regulatory networks underlying cancer cell growth.
In her teaching and advising work, Dr. McMurray has helped to re-develop the core graduate curriculum in the School of Medicine and Dentistry, as well as contributing to the creation of courses on biostatistics for biologists and core research skills with the IIE: Miner Library. She serves as part of the teaching teams for courses on biomedical informatics, quantitative biology, genomics, and cell / molecular biology, as well as mentoring students and fellows in the Ph.D. programs on Cell Biology of Disease, Genetics, Development and Stem Cells (GDSC) and Translational Biomedical Sciences (TBS).