Meghan Morrissey

Biography

Dr. Morrissey attended the University of Notre Dame, earning a BS in Biological Sciences. She then completed her PhD at Duke University, studying how extracellular matrix informs cell behavior during development and cancer metastasis. Dr. Morrissey went on to do postdoctoral research in Ron Vale's lab at UCSF. At UCSF, she developed a research program studying macrophage cell biology. Dr. Morrissey joined the faculty at UCSB in the fall of 2020.

Research

Macrophages patrol our tissues looking for signs of injury or infection. The Morrissey Lab wants to understand how macrophages measure, add and subtract all the signals they receive to calculate their response to a target. We use high resolution live imaging, synthetic biology and biochemistry to figure out when and where signaling molecules are activated to make these essential decisions. We are motivated by re-wiring macrophage signaling pathways to generate new cancer immunotherapies.

Selected Publications

Tight nanoscale clustering of Fcγ-receptors using DNA origami promotes phagocytosis. Kern N, Dong R, Douglas SM, Vale RD, Morrissey MA. eLife 2020 Jun 3. doi: 10.7554/eLife.68311

CD47 ligation repositions the inhibitory receptor SIRPA to suppress integrin activation and phagocytosis. Morrissey MA, Kern N, Vale RD. Immunity. 2020 Aug 8. doi: 10.1016/j.immuni.2020.07.008.

Chimeric antigen receptors that trigger phagocytosis. Morrissey MA*, Williamson AP*, Steinbach AM, Roberts EW, Kern N, Headley MB, Vale RD. Elife. 2018 Jun 4;7:e36688. doi: 10.7554/eLife.36688. PMID: 29862966