Alexa McCray

Alexa McCray, PhD

Professor of Medicine, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
Co-Founder, DBMI

Alexa T. McCray is Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and the Department of Medicine, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. She conducts research on knowledge representation and discovery, with a special focus on the significant problems that persist in the curation, dissemination, and exchange of scientific and clinical information in biomedicine and health. Dr. McCray joined Harvard Medical School in 2005, where she co-founded the Center for Biomedical Informatics, now the Department of Biomedical Informatics. She served as a Principal Investigator of the US-wide Undiagnosed Diseases Network, an NIH research study that seeks to provide answers for patients and families affected by undiagnosed conditions.

Dr. McCray is the former director of the Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications, an intramural research division of the National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health. While at the NIH, she directed the design and development of a number of national information resources, including ClinicalTrials.gov, Genetics Home Reference, and Profiles in Science, and she played a key role in the UMLS project, a large-scale effort that integrates health and biomedical terminologies to enable interoperability among computer systems. 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 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 National Academy of Medicine in 2001. She is 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 the immediate past chair of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s (NASEM) Board on Research Data and Information, and she chaired a 2018 NASEM consensus study entitled Open Science by Design: Realizing a Vision for 21st Century Research.

Informatics Research, Development, and Training at the Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications.
Authors: McCray AT.
Yearb Med Inform
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UMLS language and vocabulary tools.
Authors: Browne AC, Divita G, Aronson AR, McCray AT.
AMIA Annu Symp Proc
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An upper-level ontology for the biomedical domain.
Authors: McCray AT.
Comp Funct Genomics
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Evaluation of the UMLS as a terminology and knowledge resource for biomedical informatics.
Authors: Bodenreider O, Mitchell JA, McCray AT.
Proc AMIA Symp
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Supporting open access to scientific information.
Authors: McCray AT, Haux R.
Methods Inf Med
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The lexical properties of the gene ontology.
Authors: McCray AT, Browne AC, Bodenreider O.
Proc AMIA Symp
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Evaluating UMLS strings for natural language processing.
Authors: McCray AT, Bodenreider O, Malley JD, Browne AC.
Proc AMIA Symp
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Processing medical data, information and knowledge: new opportunities in the information society.
Authors: Haux R, McCray AT.
Methods Inf Med
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Aggregating UMLS semantic types for reducing conceptual complexity.
Authors: McCray AT, Burgun A, Bodenreider O.
Stud Health Technol Inform
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Design and implementation of a national clinical trials registry.
Authors: McCray AT, Ide NC.
J Am Med Inform Assoc
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