Dr. McNair is the Principal Consultant at Equipoise Consulting, LLC. From 2013 to 2023, Dr. McNair was the Chief Medical Officer for the WIRB-Copernicus Group (WCG). In additional overall corporate medical responsibilities (COVID-19 policies, etc), she provided medical support to the entire WCG organization, and specifically to WCG IRB. As part of the WCG IRB Executive Committee, she oversaw IRB member selection and training, IRB policy development helped to maintain regulatory and accreditation compliance. She also provided consultation to institutions and pharma/biotech companies on a wide range of issues related to protocol design, regulatory compliance, human subject protection, and ethical policy development (pre-approval access, subject compensation).
Prior to joining WCG, Dr. McNair was also Principal at Equipoise Consulting, providing services to multiple biopharma companies, providing medical guidance on clinical development strategies and study designs for new drug studies, and medical oversight of all phases of clinical trials as well as consultation on ethical policies and AAHRPP accreditation. Before becoming a consultant, Dr. McNair was the medical lead for the telaprevir development program at Vertex Pharmaceuticals, with oversight of the phase 1-3 studies.
Dr. McNair is adjunct faculty at Boston University and teaches graduate courses on the scientific design of clinical research studies.
Dr. McNair graduated from the University of Connecticut School of Medicine and trained in general surgery at Boston University Medical Center. She completed her Master’s in Public Health at Boston University concentrating in Biostatistics/Epidemiology, and her Master’s of Science in Bioethics at Union Graduate College concentrating in research ethics. Dr. McNair is an associate editor for the Journal of Empirical Research on Human Research Ethics, and is in the NYU Compassionate Use Pre-Approval Access (CUPA) Working Group. She has previously been part of the Human Subjects Review Board of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA HSRB), various working groups in Harvard’s Multi-regional Clinical Trials (MRCT) program and the Advancing Effective Research Ethics Oversight (AEREO) consortium.