McKenna Harpring graduated high school in 2015 from Christian Educational Consortium. She received the Kentucky Governor’s School for the Arts scholarship and the Monsignor Horrigan Scholarship to attend Bellarmine University in Louisville, Kentucky. While at Bellarmine, McKenna graduated cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, with minors in Biology and Physics in 2019. In 2019, she enrolled in the Microbiology, Immunology and Biochemistry track in Biomedical Sciences program in the University of Tennessee Health Science Center’s College of Graduate Health Sciences. McKenna joined Dr. John Cox’s lab at UTHSC in the spring of 2020. She completed her doctoral degree in October of 2024. Her research is centered on exploring the mechanisms of cell division in obligate intracellular bacteria to develop therapeutics targeting these bacteria specifically, rather than relying on broad-spectrum antibiotics.
