Meagan Mcgrath

Meagan Mcgrath is a Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology, Monash University, where she works within the Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences. She leads the Skeletal Muscle Research Group under Professor Christina Mitchell, co-supervising students and managing research activities for over 13 years.

Her research focuses on three priority areas: (1) skeletal muscle development and homeostasis via novel gene discovery, (2) identification of new disease pathways in muscular dystrophies/myopathies using CRISPR/Cas9 models, and (3) pre-clinical testing of therapeutic targets for skeletal muscle diseases. A key contribution was identifying FHL1 gene mutations as the cause of FHL1 myopathies, solving a 40-year enigma in Reducing Body Myopathy.

Over the past decade, her work has revealed autophagy defects as a central mechanism in neuromuscular diseases, focusing on regulatory proteins in phosphoinositide pathways. She collaborates on national and international projects funded by NHMRC and ARC, with 31 research outputs and highly cited publications.