David McKinney
Associate Director of Medicinal Chemistry and Data Science in the Center for the Development of Therapeutics
David McKinney is the head of medicinal chemistry and data science within the Center for the Development of Therapeutics (CDoT) at the Ó³»´«Ã½ of MIT and Harvard. He and his team collaboratively provide chemistry and computational chemistry support to faculty labs to identify and characterize relevant chemical matter to translate biological insights into therapeutics across a variety of disease areas.
Prior to joining the Ó³»´«Ã½ in 2015, McKinney spent ten years at AstraZeneca R&D Boston (Waltham) working on small molecule antibacterial agents. At AstraZeneca, McKinney led chemistry efforts resulting in small molecule validation of several novel antibacterial targets. The initial chemical matter came from a variety of sources including high throughput screening (HTS), fragment-based screening, and recent chemical literature, as well as older natural products and existing drugs. He has extensive medicinal chemistry experience across the portfolio from early work on fragment and structure-based drug design and high throughput screening follow-up, in addition to later lead optimization work to support in vivo proof of concept studies and drug candidate selection.
McKinney earned a B.S from Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, an M.S. in chemistry from The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and a Master of Public Health degree from Tufts University.
September 2025
