David Musson, MD, PhD
David Musson is Chief Executive Officer and co-Founder of Lunar Medical Inc. He is a medical doctor and cognitive psychologist whose interests span spaceflight and aerospace medicine, medical education, artificial intelligence, and cognitive neuroscience. He studied astronomy and physics before receiving his MD at the University of Western Ontario, and after graduation joined the Canadian Airforce where he served as a Flight Surgeon (aeromedical physician) in Canada, Europe and the Middle East. Returning to the civilian world he practiced general medicine, urgent care and mental health medicine in Toronto, Canada. In 1998, Dr. Musson began graduate studies at the University of Texas at Austin where he completed a PhD in Psychology with a minor in Aerospace Engineering. Studying under noted aviation Human Factors pioneer Robert Helmreich, his work in Texas focused on human personality structure and high performance teams in aviation, space and medicine. Returning to Canada in 2005, Dr. Musson joined the faculty at McMaster University where he founded the Centre for Simulation Based Learning. In applying aviation training models, he developed simulation programs to improve Patient Safety and reduce medical error for the MD program and medical specialty training programs. From 2014-2019, Dr. Musson served as the Associate Dean of the MD Program at the Northern Ontario School of Medicine, Canada's newest medical school.
Dr. Musson has conducted studies on medical care delivery in remote and isolated environments, including studying those environments as terrestrial analogs for spaceflight. These projects have been funded by Canadian Space Agency (CSA), NASA, and the National Space Biomedical Research Institute (NSBRI). These have included summer 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 at the Eureka Weather Station on Ellesmere Island in the Canadian high Arctic (2012). While at McMaster, Dr. Musson began working with Dr. Thomas Doyle, a fellow McMaster faculty member with expertise in Computer and Biomedical Engineering. Together, he and Dr. Doyle founded Lunar Medical Inc. in 2012 and completed a series of technology assessments and concept studies in medical technology for the Canadian Space Agency. In 2016-2017 Dr. Musson served as co-PI on the NASA NSBRI project 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.
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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.