About the chancellor
David D. McManus, MD’02, ScM’12, MBA, professor of medicine, renowned clinical and research cardiologist, and expert in digital medicine, is the chancellor of UMass Chan Medical School. Dr. McManus was appointed in April 2026 and began his tenure in June 2026.
He is the first alumnus to lead UMass Chan.
McManus is the founding director of UMass Chan’s Program in Digital Medicine and has secured more than $140 million in National Institutes of Health funding. He has published more than 400 scientific papers focused on digital health and cardiovascular care. Throughout his career, he has led efforts to train the next generation of healthcare innovators and researchers through programs funded by the NIH and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. He has advised and mentored more than 100 undergraduate and graduate students, research staff, postdoctoral trainees and faculty members.
Notably, McManus was the principal investigator on the $123 million Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics, or RADx, grant, which was awarded by the NIH during the COVID-19 pandemic to develop innovative strategies for testing that proved essential to safeguarding community health and slowing disease spread. The RADx grant is the largest funding award in University of Massachusetts’ history.
McManus earned his MD from the T.H. Chan School of Medicine in 2002. He completed his internal medicine residency at the University of California San Francisco before returning to UMass Chan, where he completed a cardiovascular medicine fellowship and a clinical cardiac electrophysiology fellowship.
He earned a master's degree in clinical investigation from the Morningside Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences at UMass Chan in 2012 and an Executive MBA from MIT’s Sloan School of Management in 2025. He is a Massachusetts native and earned his undergraduate degree in biological sciences from Brown University. He met his wife, Diana McManus, MD’02, while they were both medical students at UMass Chan.
A practicing physician and member of UMass Memorial Medical Group, McManus joined the Department of Medicine at UMass Chan and UMass Memorial Health in 2009. In January 2021, he was appointed chair of the Department of Medicine where he oversaw 16 divisions, nearly 400 faculty members, 80 principal investigators and more than $70 million in annual research funding. He built a culture of innovation and excellence that has made UMass Chan a destination for top academic talent. During his time as chair, he recruited or promoted 10 new division chiefs, built new research infrastructure, and oversaw growth in the department’s clinical programs. He was also invested as the Richard M. Haidack Professorship in Medicine in 2021.
For his work in establishing the Program in Digital Medicine and implementing new approaches to healthcare, including UMass Memorial Health’s Hospital at Home program, he earned recognition as a 2026 Innovator in Healthcare by the Boston Business Journal and a 2026 “Power 100” by the Worcester Business Journal. He is a member of the American Heart Association Central Massachusetts Board of Directors and previously served as founding editor-in-chief of Cardiovascular Digital Health Journal.