Dr. Alexa McCray

Alexa T. McCray is Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School (HMS). She is the former Director of the Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications, a research division of the National Library of Medicine (NLM) at the National Institutes of Health. Before joining NLM in 1986, she was on the research staff of IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center. She received the Ph.D. from Georgetown University in 1981, and for three years was on the faculty there. She conducted pre-doctoral research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Dr. McCray was elected to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences in 2001. She is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics. She is a past member of the board of both the American Medical Informatics Association and the International Medical Informatics Association. She serves as senior consulting editor of Methods of Information in Medicine, and she is a past member of the editorial board of the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association.

Dr. McCray conducts research in biomedical informatics, including research in scientific collaboration, scholarly communication, ontologies, autism spectrum disorders phenotype-genotype correlations, and health communication/literacy. A current research focus is on methodologies designed to unlock the potential of multiple, distributed, and heterogeneous datasets by devising informatics strategies that effectively bridge the gap between molecular biology and medicine.