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Dr. McDonald, a board-certified internist, is President and Chief Executive Officer of the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) and the ABIM Foundation. Dr. McDonald previously served as ABIM’s Senior Vice President for Academic and Medical Affairs from 2014 to 2024. Prior to joining ABIM, Dr. McDonald served as Associate Chair of the Department of Medicine and Residency Program Director at the Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN, one of the nation’s largest internal medicine residencies. While at the Mayo Clinic, he led the program's participation in the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education’s (ACGME’s) Educational Innovations Project, which investigated many concepts that would eventually become part of the Next Accreditation System. Since joining ABIM, he has continued his role in patient care and GME as an attending physician of the J. Edwin Wood Clinic and faculty of the Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia.

As a longtime member of the Association of Program Directors in Internal Medicine (APDIM), Dr. McDonald chaired the APDIM Survey Committee from 2007 to 2011, leading the development of longitudinally tracked surveys addressing areas of importance in GME. He was a member of the ACGME Residency Review Committee for Internal Medicine (RC-IM) during the transition to the Next Accreditation System and continued on the RC-IM as ABIM’s Ex Officio member during his tenure as SVP for Academic and Medical Affairs.

The focus of Dr. McDonald's professional career has been the training of internal medicine residents and fellows to provide better care to patients by incorporating the best evidence available for both medical care and medical education. A well-respected leader in the field of GME and medical education research, Dr. McDonald has authored more than 110 peer-reviewed publications. During his tenure as Program Director, he was recognized with the Mayo Graduate School of Medicine Diversity Champion award for his work increasing the numbers of women and those underrepresented in medicine in its residencies and fellowships. He also co-founded the Mayo International Health Program, which has subsequently funded hundreds of trainees to pursue educational rotations caring for medically underserved populations in international settings. Dr. McDonald continues to support this work.

He earned an undergraduate degree in physics with highest distinction (grade point average) and with highest honors (based on his thesis in atomic collision research at Oak Ridge National Laboratory) from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he was a Morehead Scholar. He went on to train as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute/National Institutes of Health (NIH) Research Scholar at NIH’s Bethesda campus. He earned his medical degree from Mayo Medical School and completed an internal medicine internship on the Osler Medical Service of The Johns Hopkins Hospital. He completed internal medicine residency at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., where he also served as Chief Resident. He later earned a master of public health degree from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, while working as a full-time hospitalist at the Mayo Clinic.

Dr. McDonald attained the rank of Professor of Medicine at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine and Science and is Adjunct Professor of Medicine at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

Having received many awards for medical education, in particular the teaching of the physical exam, in 2019, Dr. McDonald received the Alliance for Academic Medicine Special Recognition Award “…presented to an individual who has contributed most to helping the Alliance meet its mission which ‘promotes the advancement and professional development of its members who prepare the next generation of internal medicine physicians and leaders through education, research, engagement, and collaboration.’”

Dr. McDonald has been certified in Internal Medicine by ABIM continuously since 2000. In addition to being a longtime, proud member of the Alliance for Academic Internal Medicine and APDIM, he is a fellow of the American College of Physicians and a member of the Society of Hospital Medicine.