David M. Eddy is a Courtesy Professor in the Institute for Advanced Discovery & Innovation and a physician, mathematician, and health care analyst who has done seminal work in mathematical modeling of diseases, clinical practice guidelines, and evidence-based medicine. In summarizing his career, the National Academy of Medicine (of which he is a member) emphasized his innovative thinking and practices, noting that "more than 25 years ago, Eddy wrote the seminal paper on the role of guidelines in medical decision-making, the first Markov model applied to clinical problems, and the original criteria for coverage decisions; he was the first to use and publish the term 'evidence-based'." Eddy was a professor at Stanford University and the J. Alexander McMahon Professor at Duke University before he left academia to become an independent researcher and entrepreneur. He founded Archimedes Inc., a health care modeling company, and was chief medical officer until he retired in 2013. The author of five books and more than 100 first-authored papers, including a series of 28 in the Journal of the American Medical Association, his writings span from technical mathematical theories to broad health policy topics. He has received 10 national and international awards in several fields, including applied mathematics, health technology assessment, health care quality, environmental sciences, and outcomes research, as well as awards from five organizations for lifetime achievement. In 2012, he was ranked the 13th most innovative person in health care by "Health Future 100." He holds two U.S. patents.