Robert A McDougal, PhD

Robert A. McDougal, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor in the Health Informatics Division of Biostatistics with a secondary appointment in Biomedical Informatics and Data Science. His research focuses on the development of informatics methods to facilitate the computational study of neurological diseases of aging (e.g., Alzheimer’s, stroke), which require a multi-scale approach incorporating biophysical details at the level of receptors on neurons with large scale network effects, potentially including the body and the environment. He wrote and received two multi-PI R01s which are currently funding this work.

His group maintains two major components of the computational neuroscience ecosystem – the model discovery tool ModelDB and -- together with its founder Michael Hines -- the NEURON simulator. He is on the NeuroML Scientific Committee (a standards organization for computational neuroscience) and is an elected board member for the Organization for Computational Neuroscience.

Dr. McDougal earned his Ph.D. in Mathematics from The Ohio State University in 2011. He did postdoctoral training at Yale in computer science, neurobiology, and medical informatics; during the later, he earned an MS in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics from Yale. From 2016 until joining the Department of Biostatistics in 2019, he was an Associate Research Scientist at Yale University in the Department of Neuroscience. He is affiliated with the Health Informatics (HI), Computational Biology and Biomedical Informatics, and Interdepartment Neuroscience graduate programs at Yale. He designed and teaches two "Computational Methods for Informatics" courses: EMPH 544 and BIS 634.