Dr. McLean has been associated with Penn for 40 years as an undergraduate Biological Basis of Behavior (BBB) Program major, a graduate student, a senior research investigator, and as a lecturer and lab instructor for the BBB program, the School of Veterinary Medicine and the School of Medicine. Dr. McLean was born in Northern Ireland but spent most of her youth in a Philadelphia suburb and entered Penn to become a BBB major in the second year of the program. She received her PhD in Anatomy at Penn in the laboratory of Dr. Larry Palmer, investigating the contribution of linear mechanisms to the velocity selectivity of simple cells in primary visual cortex. After completing a post-doctoral fellowship with Dr. Barry Waterhouse at Hahnemann University, where she investigated how norepinephrine could modulate neuronal responses to moving visual stimuli, Dr. McLean returned to Penn and has studied plasticity in the adult primary visual cortex (with Dr. Larry Palmer), efficiency of information transmission by retinal ganglion cells (with Dr. Peter Sterling), and most recently the neural circuits involved with breathing and vocal control in the songbird (with Dr. Marc Schmidt). She has taught at Penn for over 25 years and won the College of Liberal and Professional Studies Award for Distinguished Teaching in Undergraduate and Post-Baccalaureate Programs in 2017. She teaches Behavioral Neuroscience.
