Keynote Speech
Dr. Alexa T. McCray
Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and the Department of Medicine, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center

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.