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 Health, Dr. McDonnell provides clinical, academic, and administrative leadership of the hospital-wide diabetes program.
A graduate of Boston University School of Medicine, the New York Presbyterian Hospital Columbia residency program, and Endocrinology fellowship at Boston Medical Center, Dr. McDonnell’s clinical research focus is health outcomes of scalable specialty-level diabetes care delivery services in the acute and ambulatory settings. In 2017 Dr. McDonnell was a founding faculty member of the Boston Autologous Islet Replacement Therapy (BAIRT) consortium that includes Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Joslin Diabetes Center, Harvard University, Semma Therapeutics and Dana Farber Cancer Institute. BAIRT aims to develop methodology to provide autologous stem cell derived beta cells to people with diabetes and to demonstrate this approach as an effective treatment strategy.
Dr. McDonnell teaches medical students at Harvard Medical School and is key faculty for both the Medicine and Endocrinology training programs at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. She delivers multiple local, regional and international lectures and webinars per year in the field of Diabetes Care. A highly engaged clinician, she has served on several national committees and was appointed Chair of the Endocrine Society Guidelines committee for 2021. She has co-authored the Society of Thoracic Surgeons practice guideline on blood glucose management during adult cardiac surgery, and multiple Endocrine Society guidelines, including the Pharmacologic Management of Obesity, and Management of Diabetes in Older Adults and the Management of Hyperglycemia in the Hospital Setting.