Dr. McHugh is a Senior Postdoctoral Scientist in Simon Draper's Blood-stage Malaria research group in Oxford. She completed her DPhil in Clinical Medicine at the Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine in the Arthritis Research group headed by Paul Bowness, before moving to the Botnar Research Centre to research the role of HLA-B27 in arthritis. Since joining the Draper research group in 2015 she has worked on the development of novel monoclonal antibody (mAb) therapeutic interventions for the treatment of hematological disorders.

Her research now centers around therapeutic mAbs and vaccine development for blood-stage malaria. As lead scientist for mAb research in the Draper group, she is focused on developing and establishing improved methodologies for mAb discovery and characterisation from human clinical trial volunteers. She combines high-throughput epitope mapping with the functional activity of panels of mAbs in order to better understand the vaccine-induced antibody responses, which can be used to inform the design of the next-generation of malaria vaccines. She has also been awarded several research grants to develop potent mAbs as therapeutics for infectious disease, and is interested in developing new technology for engineering mAbs with improved efficacy.

I teach Immunology (Paper IV) and Data Handling (Paper VI) to Pembroke Biochemistry students, and also an introductory biochemistry course to visiting students that encompasses some core metabolism and molecular genetics topics.