Alexa T. McCray is a former Director (1997-2004) of the Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications, a division of the U.S. National Library of Medicine. The Lister Hill Center conducts research and development for the broad purpose of improving health-care information dissemination and use. Dr. McCray's research interests lie at the intersection of computer and information science and medicine. She publishes in several research areas, including medical language processing, digital libraries, and consumer health informatics.

Dr. McCray is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics. She is a member of the board of the American Medical Informatics Association, and a past member of the board of the International Medical Informatics Association. She serves as co-editor-in-chief of Methods of Information in Medicine, and she is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association.

Before joining NLM in 1986, Dr. McCray was a Research Staff Member at IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center. She received the Ph.D. from Georgetown University in 1981, and for three years was on the faculty there. She conducted pre-doctoral research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.