David Musson, MD, PhD
David Musson is Chief Executive Officer and co-Founder of Lunar Medical Inc, a Canadian company developing solutions for medical care in extreme and austere environments. Dr. Musson is a medical doctor and cognitive psychologist whose areas of expertise span aerospace and remote care medicine, medical education, artificial intelligence, and cognitive science. He received his MD from the University of Western Ontario and completed his potgraduate internship at the University of Toronto. After receiving his MD, he joined the Canadian Armed Forces and served as a Medical Officer with postings in Canada, Europe and the Middle East. He was Flight Surgeon to 421 and 439 CF-18 Fighter Squadrons stationed at Canadian Forces Base (CFB) Baden-Soellingen in Germany, and served as Base Flight Surgeon at CFB Toronto. Following his military service, Dr. Musson completed a PhD in Psychology (with a minor in Aerospace Engineering) at the University of Texas at Austin, where he studied under noted Aerospace Psychologist Robert Helmreich. At Texas, his PhD thesis focused on high performance teams in aviation, space and medicine. In 2006, Dr. Musson was recruited to faculty at McMaster University where he founded the Centre for Simulation Based Learning, a high fidelity simulation training centre for McMaster’s Schools of Medicine and Nursing. From 2014-2019, Dr. Musson was Associate Dean of the MD Program at the Northern Ontario School of Medicine, and a member of the Medical Council of Canada. In 2019, Dr. Musson returned to Hamilton and McMaster University, and now leads full time as CEO of Lunar Medical, a company he cofounded in 2012 along with McMaster Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Dr. Thomas Doyle.
Dr. Musson’s research has examined psychological performance and medical care delivery in remote and isolated environments, including environments characterized as terrestrial analogs for human spaceflight. This work has been funded by Canadian Space Agency (CSA), NASA, and the National Space Biomedical Research Institute (NSBRI). Field work has involved expeditions to the Haughton Mars Project Research Station (HMP-RS) on Devon Island in the Canadian Arctic (2009), the NASA-CSA-DLR In Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) program on Mauna Kea in Hawaii (2010) and the Eureka Weather Station on Ellesmere Island in the Canadian high Arctic (2012). In 2016-2017 Dr. Musson served as co-PI on the NASA/NSBRI funded study to develop the first purpose-built space medical bay simulator at Harvard's Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, MA, along with collaborators Steven Yule at Harvard and Thomas Doyle at McMaster. Most recently, Drs. Musson and Doyle have been developing biomedical monitoring and decision support systems for human spaceflight under funding from the Canadian Space Agency. Current work focusses on adapting those systems to military combat casualty care
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Image:Lunar Medical Inc.
Image:Lunar Medical Inc.
Left: Haughton Mars Project Research Station (HMP-RS) on Devon Island, Nunavut, Canadian Arctic (2009). Right: David Musson and graduate students Bosco Law and Matthew Turnock preparing medical event simulation in the Canadian Space Agency medical tent.