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Keynote Speech

Dr. Alexa T. McCray

Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and the Department of Medicine, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center

Re-imagining Scientific Culture in a Changing World

Throughout history, scientists have been both influenced by and constrained by the societal context in which they conduct their research. Scientific practices evolve as societies evolve. Who conducts scientific research, what tools and methods are available to them, what norms there are for dissemination of scientific knowledge, and how the society at large views the importance and trustworthiness of scientific results all have an effect on the scientific culture of the time. Major scientific and technological innovations can and do disrupt many aspects of society, including scholarly research. Whether we, as scientists, embrace these disruptors, ignore them, or even condemn them can have a direct impact on scientific progress, either accelerating or restraining our ability to address important societal challenges of the era.

Extraordinary scientific and technological advances in the latter part of the twentieth century and the first quarter of this century have led to profound and transformative changes in almost every facet of life. This talk will discuss some of these advances and consider the impact they have had and continue to have on scientific culture as we know it today. The talk will conclude with thoughts on some of the unintended consequences of these enormous changes, and how scientists themselves can work to ensure that their practices lead to the best possible science in service of the greater public good.

About

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.