Dr. Alexa T. McCray is Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and the Department of Medicine, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. She is the former director of the Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications, an intramural research division of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH). Before joining the NIH, she was on the research staff of IBM’s T.J. Watson Research Center. She received the PhD from Georgetown University and conducted pre-doctoral research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dr. McCray conducts research in biomedical informatics, particularly as it relates to the curation and dissemination of scientific and clinical data. While at the NIH, she directed the design and development of a number of openly available information resources, including ClinicalTrials.gov, an international database of clinical research studies and results. At Harvard, she most recently was a leader of the NIH-supported U.S.-wide Undiagnosed Diseases Network, a research program that seeks to provide answers for patients and families affected by rare and undiagnosed conditions. Dr. McCray is an elected member of the U.S. National Academy of Medicine, a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American College of Medical Informatics, and the International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics. She is past chair of the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s (NASEM) Board on Research Data and Information. She chaired a 2018 NASEM consensus study entitled Open Science by Design: Realizing a Vision for 21st Century Research and recently chaired a Harvard Medical School faculty committee concerned with rigor, reproducibility and responsibility in research.

Dr. Marcum is a Senior Statistician and Senior Scientist in the Office of the Chief Statistician of the United States at the White House Office of Management and Budget. His portfolio focuses on data access, science and information policy, cybersecurity, and artificial intelligence. He is the Senior Advisor to the Federal Statistical Research Data Centers and the staff lead on matters related to scientific integrity and research security. Immediately, prior to his current role, Dr. Marcum served in the Biden-Harris Administration as the Assistant Director for Open Science and Data Policy in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). Dr. Marcum oversaw transformative science policies in his OSTP portfolio that led to the 2022 OSTP Public Access Memo, the 2023 Federal Scientific Integrity Framework, and the White House declaring the 2023 as a Year of Open Science. Dr. Marcum received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California, Irvine (UCI) in 2011. He also has a Master’s degree in demographic and social analysis from UCI and completed a post-doctoral fellowship in economics and statistics at the RAND Corporation. After his formal training, he joined the intramural research faculty of the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) as a staff scientist and methodologist where his research focused on social networks and health. Eventually, he moved into science policy at the NIH and was appointed to be the Genomic Program Administrator and chair of the Data Access Committee at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). His professional accolades include over fifty scientific publications, a commendation of exceptional service from OSTP, two Special Act or Service Award honors from NIAID, a Matilda White Rile Early Stage Investigator Honor from the Office of Behavioral and Social Science Research at the NIH, two GREAT Awards from the NHGRI, an Order of Merit Award from the University of California-Irvine, and two On-the-Spot Awards and an Achievement Award from the Office of Management and Budget. He is a fellow of the Gerontological Society of America, nominated by his peers for his research, training, and advocacy on issues related to aging and the life course.