“I loved art history, humanities, all that good stuff, but I also liked the theoretical aspects of science, too. So I did a little bit of everything,” McLaughlin said.

McLaughlin’s dual loves didn’t end when he got his degree. He wanted to begin a career in pharmaceuticals and biotech but the industry is notoriously difficult to break into out of college. His Art History focus was Asian art history and so he considered taking part in the Japan Exchange and Teaching Programme which would have brought him to Japan to teach English for a year while having the opportunity to spend time at the places he had studied. That path would have led him to pursue a Ph.D. in Art History and become a professor.

“That’s something I genuinely think I would have loved and found to be incredibly worthwhile,” McLaughlin said. “And it truly was one of those circumstantial things where I spoke with mutual connection over the phone and they responded back saying they might have a year-long internship opportunity in San Francisco, would I like to do it? That set me on this trajectory where I’ve had a few different roles and lives in the biotech and pharmaceutical space.”

That internship at Genentech turned into three years working in clinical operations and global product development. From there McLaughlin spent a year at GRAIL, returned to Genentech for two years and after a brief stop at Adela, he has now spent over three years at Johnson & Johnson  Innovative Medicine in Research & Development where he is an Associate Director and Portfolio Head in Data Science & Digital Health.

“Data science and digital health has become a prominent emerging field in pharmaceuticals,” McLaughlin said, “What I do is leverage data science, epidemiology, AI and machine learning to develop algorithms that make our clinical trials more robust and efficient. The group I work in, we help develop large phase three clinical trials to get life-saving drugs on the market to help patients.”

McLaughlin specifically works in Neuroscience, Ophthalmology, and Immunology, and the algorithms he works on are designed to help find diverse patient populations.

“Many of these patient populations tend to be underrepresented, overburdened in certain disease areas, and we want to make sure they’re included in our clinical trials and research,” McLaughlin said. “The reason being, first, it’s ethical, and second, good comprehensive research has  heterogeneous data. You don’t want to just recruit the exact same kind of person in your trials over and over, because you’re not going to get good data and it's not reflective of the real-world.

“We have diverse trials because the more diverse your trials are, the better the data, the more likely that the data you publish and the way the medicine works in your trials will accurately work and reflect in a real-world population. In recent years, it’s become that much more evident that diversity and patient heterogeneity is foundational in the work that we do if we want to improve and save lives.”

McLauglin is currently halfway through a two-year program at the Yale University School of Public Health working toward an Executive Master of Public Health and Epidemiology. As far as those dual majors from his undergraduate degree, it turns out Art History can be a big help in data science.

“In art history you write these papers using something called formal analysis where you’re analyzing a piece of artwork and so much of it is pattern recognition,” McLaughlin said. “You’re analyzing a lot of these themes and patterns at a really broad level, and then narrowing it down to a specific trait or analysis. It’s just a skill that was really helpful to develop that I did not think I would use in this way. So I’ve really appreciated that.”

McLaughlin also really appreciates his St. Andrew’s education, which he feels set him up for success at Wesleyan. “It was almost like a liberal arts experience in high school, and it really encourages this interest in learning for the sake of learning. All these interests and passions that you’ve had in middle school and high school have been stoked and encouraged and they fully blossom in college. For me, I had this moment where it kind of clicked – I’m here, I can take advantage of everything here, leave no stone unturned. And I think that was a direct impact of St. Andrew’s and its philosophy of teaching and learning.”