Amelia McCue successfully defended her PhD thesis titled “Engineering Tumor-Selective T Cell Engager Prodrugs for Cancer Immunotherapy” on Thursday, May 23, 2024, under the guidance of Dr. Brian Kuhlman.
Amelia obtained her B.A. in Chemistry in 2018 at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, NH where she synthesized photoactivatable chemotherapy drugs for targeted drug delivery in Dr. Thomas Shell’s Lab. This work sparked her passion for designing targeted therapeutics and pursuing biomedical research for her PhD thesis.She joined the Biochemistry and Biophysics Department at UNC in 2018 in the Biophysics track. Her graduate research in Dr. Brian Kuhlman’s lab focused on designing safer antibody therapeutics for treating cancer that engage the immune system to direct T cell killing of cancer in a tumor-selective manner. While at UNC, Amelia also served as a committee chair for numerous BCBP committees – the Social Committee, Student Seminar Planning Committee and the Student Seminar Nominations Committee. She was awarded funding from a Biophysics T32 Training Grant, an NIH Diversity Supplement, and a UNC Dissertation Completion Fellowship during her time in the Kuhlman Lab.
Amelia will be joining Dr. Jamie Spangler’s lab at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD, as a postdoctoral fellow, where she will continue her work in translational immuno-engineering and protein therapeutic design.
We wish you all the best, Dr. McCue!