September 5, 2023 McClean receives fresh MIRA funding Written By: Tom Ziemer Departments: Biomedical Engineering Categories: Grants|Research Megan McClean, an associate professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has earned renewed funding from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences for her work elucidating the processes by which cells sense and respond to their environments. The five-year, more than $2 million grant is a continuation of her Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award (MIRA), which targets “the nation’s highly talented and promising investigators.” McClean employs optogenetic systems, which use light-sensitive proteins to control cellular processes, to uncover the inner workings of biological signaling networks. Her original MIRA grant has funded her lab’s recent projects examining how cellular transcription factors communicate multiple signals to downstream genes and developing a new method for high-throughput testing of optogenetic systems. Photo caption: Associate Professor Megan McClean and PhD student Zack Harmer work with their novel optogenetics setup. Photo by: Tom Ziemer.