Steve McDonald is co-director and senior information specialist at Cochrane Australia, responsible for the learning and education program. He has extensive experience conducting evidence syntheses for Cochrane and several government agencies, including WHO and Australia’s NHMRC. His research interests include search strategy design, innovations to enhance the efficiency of study identification through automation, methods to support living systematic reviews and guidelines, and reporting of systematic reviews. He is the information specialist with the Australian Living Evidence Collaboration, working across several living guidelines, including those in stroke and pregnancy & postnatal care. He was part of the PRISMA 2020 group.

In 2024 he completed his PhD from Monash University, which explored new approaches for identifying evidence for living guidelines.

Steve was a co-lead on Project Transform, a three-year flagship health evidence project funded by NHMRC and Cochrane, that developed machine classifiers to improve the efficiency of study identification.

Steve graduated in Social and Political Sciences from the University of Cambridge in 1991. In addition to his PhD, he has a Masters in Information Science from Loughborough University and a Graduate Diploma in International Health from Monash University. In 2015 he graduated from the Asialink Leaders Program. As part of Cochrane Australia's international responsibilities, he has helped establish and support Cochrane networks in South East Asia and East Asia. He was an elected member of Cochrane's Board of Directors from 2008 to 2015, and previously managed Cochrane’s international training program.