Michele McGuirl, Ph.D.

Michele McGuirl, Ph.D., serves as the Chief of the Research Training and Career Development Branch, where she manages institutional training, career development, and fellowship awards. She is also the Acting Director of the Division of Extramural Activities.

Dr. McGuirl joined NIDCR in 2024. Prior to that, she served as Branch Chief and Acting Director for the Division for Research Capacity Building at the National Institute of General Medical Sciences. In this role, she oversaw the expansion of the Institutional Development Award (IDeA) Networks for Clinical and Translational Research (IDeA-CTR) program and the Centers of Biomedical Research Excellence (COBRE) program, both of which build research capacity in states that historically have had low levels of NIH funding. She also managed Support for Research Excellence (SuRE) awards, which provide funding for research involving students and faculty from lower-resourced institutions. Before that, Dr. McGuirl was a Program Officer in the National Cancer Institute’s Center for Cancer Training.

Dr. McGuirl came to NIH from academia, where she was an NIH-funded investigator and Associate Professor at the University of Montana. Her research interests have included electron transfer, metallo-biochemistry, protein folding, and amyloid diseases. She earned a B.S. in chemistry from the University of Massachusetts and a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Montana State University, and she conducted postdoctoral research at the California Institute of Technology.