Senior Director of Molecular Pathology
Foundation Medicine
Douglas A. Mata, MD, MPH is Senior Director of Molecular Pathology at Foundation Medicine. He earned his B.A. in biochemistry and cell biology at Rice University and his M.D. from Baylor College of Medicine. Dr. Mata also earned his M.P.H. at the University of Cambridge and was a Fulbright Scholar at the European campus of the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Madrid.
Dr. Mata trained in surgical pathology and laboratory medicine at the Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women's Hospital/Dana-Farber Cancer Institute/Boston Children’s Hospital program, where he was awarded an Arthur Purdy Stout Stipend. Following residency, he completed a fellowship in molecular genetic pathology at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Dr. Mata joined Foundation Medicine in 2018 as a consultant pathologist with an interest in precision medicine.
Dr. Mata is the author of the textbook Statistics for Pathologists and serves as the pathology faculty member for the First Aid for the USMLE textbook series. He has published over 100 letters, editorials, and original research articles in journals including New England Journal of Medicine, Journal of the American Medical Association, Journal of Clinical Oncology, and Journal of Molecular Diagnostics. His work has been featured by The New York Times, NPR, Time Magazine, and The Washington Post.
At Foundation Medicine, Dr. Mata’s research focuses on improving patient access to comprehensive genomic profiling, mutational signature analysis for diagnosing cancers of unknown primary, and the use of cell-free DNA analysis in solid tumor and hematology patients as an alternative to traditional tissue sequencing.