Biography

Dr. McDonnell is Chief of the Diabetes Section in the Division of Endocrinology, Diabetes and Hypertension at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston. In her current role as Director of the Diabetes Program at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Dr. McDonnell provides clinical, academic, and administrative leadership of the hospital-wide diabetes program. Her current work is in establishing cost-effective approaches for delivery of specialty diabetes services on a population level. A graduate of Boston University School of Medicine, Dr. McDonnell completed her residency in internal medicine at New York Presbyterian Hospital-Columbia, where she also served as Chief Medical Resident. She then returned to Boston for her fellowship in Endocrinology at Boston Medical Center, after which she joined the faculty at Boston University School of Medicine to serve as Director of Inpatient Diabetes. In 2013, she was appointed Director of Diabetes at Boston Medical Center and in 2014 Associate Professor of Medicine. In these roles, she created an academic inpatient diabetes program that has served to increase diabetes services and regional education for providers and nurses. Expanding the model for appropriate acute diabetes care, she has developed and studied unique multidisciplinary open access clinics for diabetes rapid assessment in collaboration with the emergency department and other groups. Dr. McDonnell’s clinical research is in two areas. The first is in health outcomes research of scalable diabetes care programs that allow for individualized care both in the acute and ambulatory settings. The second is in defining inflammatory phenotypes in obesity and type 2 diabetes, specifically in the area of alterations in innate immunity in these conditions. Dr. McDonnell has been a key teaching faculty member in affiliated Medicine Residency programs, and was given an award in 2011 for Faculty Mentorship by the Department of Medicine at Boston University School of Medicine. Dr. McDonnell delivers multiple local, regional and international lectures and webinars per year in the field of Diabetes Care. She is an Associate Editor of Endocrine Practice. She has served on several national committees, including the Endocrine Society Guidelines committee. She has co-authored the Society of Thoracic Surgeons practice guideline on Blood glucose management during adult cardiac surgery, and the Endocrine Society guideline on the Pharmacologic Management of Obesity, and is currently on the Endocrine Society Guideline Task Force for the Management of Diabetes in Older Adults.

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