Bio of Commander Mark McClain, R.Ph.

CDR Mark McClain is a pharmacist trained at the University of New Mexico School of Pharmacy and worked as a hospital pharmacist at several HMO hospitals in the Albuquerque, New Mexico area. After three years as a hospital float pharmacist, he then became a Commissioned Officer with the U.S. Public Health Service in 1994 assigned to the Indian Health Service. His first PHS assignment was for providing pharmaceutical care to 26,000 urban Navaho and approximately 6,000 Pueblo Native American Indians at the Albuquerque Indian Hospital and tribal clinics at surrounding reservations. He then ran a small pharmacy as the chief pharmacist at the clinic at Isleta, a small Pueblo Indian tribe south of Albuquerque. In 1998, he transferred to the U.S. Coast Guard when he was assigned a chief pharmacist position at the Coast Guard Academy in New London, Connecticut. In December 2002, he accepted a position with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration as an Investigator/Consumer Safety Officer in Hartford, CT.

Ancillary duties as a PHS pharmacy officer require him to be part of the Office of Force Readiness Deployment, Mental Health Team-2 as a pharmacist with disaster readiness qualifications for possible deployment to domestic disasters within 3 days of a disaster in support this team’s pharmacy needs. He deployed last September to Texas for a Hurricane Ike Federal Medical Station deployment part of a Rapid Deployment Force and twice to Louisiana in 2005 as part of the relief effort for victims of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita for Field Pharmacy work. He was deployed as a pharmacist for the Strategic National Stockpile, Mobile Strike Teams, Arizona DMAT, and the chief pharmacist supporting these strike teams from Baton Rouge and in mobile clinics on the streets of New Orleans, trailer parks and shelters set up in community centers in surrounding areas.

He now is part of the FDA’s New England District Drug Inspection Team as a Drug Specialist and inspects pharmaceutical companies domestically and internationally. To maintain his pharmacy clinical currency, he works on weekends as a pharmacist. He recently returned from a foreign drug inspection trip that took him to Ireland inspecting sterile a new combination medical device/ophthalmic drug implant.