Stephanie McElhinny | Government Chief Technology Officer
Dr. Stephanie McElhinny is the Biochemistry Program Manager of the Army Research Office (ARO), DEVCOM Army Research Laboratory and the Government Chief Technology Officer for BioMADE.
As the Biochemistry Program Manager, Dr. McElhinny drives research for the Army by identifying and exploiting scientific opportunities in the areas of biochemistry, biomaterials and biotechnology. Her vision for the Biochemistry Program aims to expand the chemistry of biology and move biology outside of the cellular environment to achieve integration of biomolecular capabilities with synthetic systems. To accomplish this vision, her program emphasizes basic research focused on understanding and controlling the activity and assembly of biomolecules. The Biomolecular Specificity and Regulation thrust is focused on exploring novel approaches to engineer the specificity and regulation of biomolecules via natural or non-natural mechanisms. The Biomolecular Assembly and Organization thrust is focused on understanding the design rules that govern self-assembly of biomolecules into natural or non-natural human-designed architectures.
Dr. McElhinny is also the Government Chief Technology Officer for the DoD Bioindustrial Manufacturing and Design Ecosystem (BioMADE) Manufacturing Innovation Institute.
Dr. McElhinny received her B.S. in Chemistry from Gannon University in 1999 and her Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Biophysics from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill in 2004. Her graduate work focused on the role of DNA polymerases in the end-joining DNA double strand break repair pathway. She then moved to the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) as a postdoctoral fellow. Using biochemistry and yeast genetics, she investigated the division of labor at the eukaryotic replication fork, the efficiency with which DNA mismatch repair corrects errors made by specific DNA polymerases, and the ability of DNA polymerases to incorporate ribonucleotides during DNA replication. In 2009, she joined the Life Sciences Branch of ARO as the Biochemistry Program Manager.
