Carrie Markgraf

Carrie is a native of Williamstown, MA. She received her BA from Middlebury College in Biology and Psychology, with an Honor's Thesis investigating the role of the hippocampus in learned taste aversion. She received her MD, PhD from the Universityof Vermont, where her dissertation assessed the role of the central nucleus of the amygdala in cardiac arrhythmias. After graduation from UVM, she completed two post-doctoral fellowships at the University of Miami, FL: one in Psychology, where she also taught undergraduate classes in Introductory and advanced topics in psychology, and one in Neurology. It was during the post-doctoral fellowship in Neurology under Dr. Myron Ginsberg that she became involved in animal models of acute neurologic injury, creating some of the early behavioral outcome measures for assessing neurologic function in these models. Work in these models lead to a position at Marion Merrell Dow in Cincinnati OH, in the CNS Discovery group and after that to a position as Assistant Professor of Neurosurgery at the University of Texas-Houston Medical School. After nearly 10 years in the field of treatment of acute neurologic injury, Carrie started a new chapter of her career at Schering Plough as a Principal Scientist, then Senior Principal Scientist, setting up the company's first CNS Safety Pharmacology lab, gaining skills in GLP regulations and serving in the roles of Study Director and Study Monitor for Safety Pharmacology and Toxicology studies. She also represented the department on Project Teams on various neuroscience programs. Now at Merck, as Senior Principal Scientist, Carrie is in Discovery Sciences Support and represents the department on Project Teams in varied therapeutic areas and serves on an internal group that assists programs with abuse liability issues.

Carrie has been a member the Society for Neuroscience since 1983, and has been a full member of SOT (Society of Toxicology) since 2001. She has also been a member of the Safety Pharmacology Society (SPS) since 2001, where she has served on a number of Committees, including the Program Committee and holding the position of Chair of the Academic Outreach Committee. She is currently serving on the Board of Directors of SPS as Secretary. At the annual meetings of these societies, Carrie has presented scientific posters, given symposia presentations and organized and served as the chair of symposia on drug abuse/liability. In 2010 she was Merck's. representative to a PhRMA group responsible for industry's response to the draft FDA guidance on Assessment of Abuse Potential of Drugs. Carrie has been a member of the CCALC (Cross-Company Abuse Liability Consortium) since its inception in 2006 and has served as Co-Lead of the PAL (Preclinical Abuse Liability) sub-group of CCALC since that time. She was a member of the CCALC organizing committees for the 2008 and 2015 FDA-Industry Dialogue sessions on abuse potential issues, and is also on the By-Laws committee to establish CCALC as a scientific non-profit organization. Carrie was a founding member of the non-profit New Jersey Brain Bee Association (NJBBA), a group dedicated to neuroscience educational outreach to area schools. The NJBBA also hosted an annual local competition in neuroscience for high school students. She continues her interest in educational outreach by speaking annually with student groups interested in careers in the pharmaceutical industry at Rutgers University and at Weill Cornell Medical School.