Chair, Department of Microbiology and Physiological Systems

We are pleased to announce that UMass Chan Medical School has selected Dr. Beth McCormick to serve as the next Chair of the Department of Microbiology and Physiological Systems (MaPS), effective September 1, 2023. This appointment follows her distinguished career working on pathophysiologic mechanisms of intestinal inflammation, most recently as Vice Chair of the Department of MaPS, a role she held since 2012. While starting with enteric pathogens as models, her work not only uncovered unpredicted bacterial virulence mechanisms, but also universal and previously unknown host immune signaling cascades that also drive pathology in inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD) as well as cancer.

Dr. McCormick came to UMass Chan Medical School in 2008, after serving as associate professor of pediatrics and microbiology and as director of research of the Mucosal Immunology and Biology Research Center at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. Dr. McCormick is a scientific founder of Adiso Therapeutics, a clinical-stage biotechnology company creating medicines to treat inflammatory diseases where small molecule drugs developed based on her work are currently in Phase II clinical trials. She also founded the Center for Microbiome Research in 2014, which has evolved to become the Program in Microbiome Dynamics in 2021. The program and its research investigators integrate clinical, experimental, and computational approaches to accelerate our understanding of how the human microbiome influences human health and disease with an eye toward developing microbiome-based therapeutics.

Dr. McCormick graduated magna cum laude from the University of New Hampshire with a Bachelor of Arts degree and earned her PhD in microbiology at the University of Rhode Island. She was a postdoctoral research fellow in pathology and medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital, and a research fellow in cancer biology at the Children’s Hospital Medical Center in Boston.

Stephanie Fidel led this search with Kristen Andersen and Mia Carpiniello.