Doug McNair

Doug McNair helps other foundation teams with disease-specific biostatistics and quantitative clinical trial design for drugs and vaccines to address a range of diseases, including tuberculosis, HIV, human papillomavirus, malaria, childhood diseases, chronic diseases, neglected tropical diseases, and COVID-19. He also provides guidance on product development, drug safety, and data modeling and simulation to foundation teams that work across disease areas, including Discovery & Translational Sciences and Vaccine Development. His other areas of focus include biomarker discovery using real-world data and machine learning, predictive mathematical modeling of health economics, and health financing projects related to gender equity.

Doug is lead inventor on more than 100 patents and pending patent applications, including several involving Bayesian predictive models for clinical diagnostics. Before joining the foundation in 2019, he was president of Cerner Corporation’s predictive math modeling and artificial intelligence (AI) division, Cerner Math Inc., where he led a team of statisticians, data scientists, applied mathematicians, bioinformaticists, and financial engineers working to discover AI predictive models from real-world deidentified electronic health record data. Previous roles at Cerner included 10 years as head of regulatory affairs, responsible for both submissions and compliance, and several years as general manager of Cerner’s Kansas City and Detroit branch offices.

Doug previously headed clinical research at Abiomed (ventricular assist devices and artificial hearts) and Immune Control (receptor-targeted lymphoma therapeutics). Before that, he was a faculty member in the departments of internal medicine and pathology at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, where he co-directed the Design & Analysis core of the National Institutes of Health–sponsored National Heart and Blood Vessel Research and Demonstration Center under Drs. Tony Gotto and Michael Debakey.

Born and raised in Minnesota, Doug earned his bachelor’s and medical degrees from the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. He also studied mathematics, electrical and chemical engineering, and philosophy. He earned a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering, also from the University of Minnesota. He is board certified in general internal medicine and clinical and anatomical pathology.