Dr. McLean received his PhD at the University of Southern California with Kenneth Nelson and his MSc at the University of Guelph in Canada with Dr. Terry Beveridge. Dr. McLean’s research career at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (2000-2007), the J. Craig Venter Institute (2007-2014), and the University of Washington School of Dentistry (2014-current) has been primarily devoted to developing innovative methodologies, tools, and new genomic-based approaches to study microbial interactions within oral biofilm communities. Currently, he is funded as a PI on active NIH R01 grants that employ next generation sequencing techniques such as single-cell genomics and metatranscriptomics to characterize the microbial processes that lead to oral diseases and maintain the health of the human oral microbiome. Within these projects, one goal is to isolate and capture the genomes of oral pathogens and uncultivated novel oral phyla to gain a better understanding of these polymicrobial diseases and oral pathogen functions within in vivo communities.