Dr. Lori L. McMahon is the vice president for research at the University of Virginia. As UVA’s Chief Research Officer, Lori is responsible for executing a research growth strategy, managing and protecting a $550M UVA research enterprise.

Graduating summa cum laude from Southern Illinois University with a B.A. in biology/chemistry, Dr. McMahon earned a Ph.D. in neuropharmacology from the Department of Pharmacological and Physiological Science at Saint Louis University Health Sciences Center. She completed postdoctoral training in the Department of Neurobiology at Duke University Medical Center. Dr. McMahon possesses more than 22 years of experience as a faculty member, educator and administrator at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB). She served as the vice president for research at the Medical University of South Carolina before coming to UVA. 

She is a federally funded basic and translational neuroscience researcher with numerous awards from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and other agencies throughout her career at UAB and is nationally and internationally recognized for her work in the areas of neurodegenerative disease and neuropsychiatric illness, with a focus on synaptic plasticity and sex differences.