Eileen McMahon McQuade, Ph.D.

Dr. Eileen McMahon McQuade has studied the immune system since her undergraduate work at Eckerd College in Florida. She earned a doctorate in microbiology and immunology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, focusing on neuroimmunology. During post-doctoral training at Northwestern University in Chicago, she also studied immunoregulation of autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis, describing for the first time an immune process, epitope spreading. At Westmont, she expanded her work to  immune-mediated pathways of rheumatoid arthritis and discovered a novel strain of mice that develops arthritis spontaneously. She explores its similarities to human rheumatoid arthritis and is identifying the gene mutations responsible for inducing the phenotype.