As director of the UC Davis Writing Center, Erica Cirillo McCarthy plays a pivotal role in fostering a robust writing culture across campus. She develops and facilitates innovative support to Aggie writers, which includes training consultants to offer one-on-one sessions with UC Davis students, faculty and staff. Additionally, she collaborates with faculty to design and deliver course-specific and genre-specific writing workshops for all levels, from first-year undergraduates to graduate students. Her experiences as a first-generation student inform her culturally responsive mentoring of undergraduate and graduate consultants. She also leads writing center research and assessment, offering peer consultants valuable research and professionalization opportunities. 

Cirillo McCarthy's writing center administration experience includes directing the University Writing Center at Middle Tennessee State University from 2018 to 2024, where she earned tenure in the English Department. She also served as assistant director of the Hume Center for Writing and Speaking at Stanford University and lectured in Stanford's Program in Writing and Rhetoric from 2013-2018. She has more than 20 years of experience teaching writing and rhetoric courses to undergraduate and graduate students, and her scholarship has been published in Praxis: A Writing Center Journal; WPA: Writing Program Administration, The Peer Review and other writing center and rhetoric journals and edited collections.  

She fell in love with writing centers the minute she started tutoring at Florida Atlantic University's University Center for Excellence in Writing during her Master of Arts program. She tutored writers at a community college, Palm Beach State College, and in a Division I athlete-specific writing center in the basement of the McKale Center at University of Arizona.