Rate My Professor Erin Macaulay

Dr. Erin C. Macaulay is a Senior Lecturer, Deputy Head of Department, and Director of Teaching in the Department of Pathology and Molecular Medicine (Dunedin School of Medicine), Faculty of Medicine, at the University of Otago. Hailing from Boston, Massachusetts, USA, she completed her BSc (Hons) at the University of Denver in 2005 and her PhD in Genetics at the University of Otago in 2011. She began her postdoctoral research as a Research Fellow in the department in 2013, advanced to Lecturer in 2019, and to Senior Lecturer thereafter.

Her research specializes in epigenetic mechanisms regulating early human and placental development, pregnancy pathologies like pre-eclampsia, and their connections to later-life diseases such as cancer. Macaulay examines the activity of transposable elements, which are crucial for normal development but implicated in malignancies, and studies genetics and epigenetics of female-specific cancers including lymphangioleiomyomatosis (LAM). Funded by the Marsden Fund, Otago Innovation Proof of Concept Grant (2021), University of Otago Early Career Award for Distinction in Research (2019), and Otago Medical Research Foundation grants, her work bridges developmental biology and oncology.

Key publications include "Three transposable elements exhibiting differential expression in pre-eclampsia overlap with enhancer regions" (Placenta, 2024), "The transposable element-derived transcript of LIN28B has a placental origin and is not specific to tumours" (Molecular Genetics & Genomics, 2023), "Unveiling the hidden players: The crucial role of transposable elements in the placenta and their potential contribution to pre-eclampsia" (Placenta, 2023), "Retrotransposon Hypomethylation in Melanoma and Expression of the Embryonic MicroRNA Cluster miR-302/367" (PLoS One, 2014), and "RepExpress: A Novel Pipeline for the Quantification and Characterization of Transposable Element Expression from RNA-seq Data" (2021). With more than 426 citations, her contributions have influenced paradigms in epigenetics and disease.

In teaching, she convenes PSCI202 Medicines and Diseases and lectures in medical genetics and cancer biology courses. She holds editorial positions with Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology, Frontiers in Genetics, and Frontiers in Epigenomics and Epigenetics, and is involved in Genetics Otago and the Australian & New Zealand Placental Research Association.