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Patrick McDonald is a leading cosmologist whose work has been instrumental in advancing our understanding of dark energy through the precise measurement of baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO). His research focuses on designing and executing massive spectroscopic galaxy surveys to map the large-scale structure of the universe. McDonald was a key figure in the conceptualization of the BigBOSS experiment, a Stage IV ground-based project detailed in his 2011 paper (80 citations), which laid the groundwork for a wide-area survey covering 14,000 square degrees to study the growth of cosmic structure. This vision was realized in the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), where McDonald played a pivotal role. He co-authored the first detection of the BAO signal from early DESI data in 2023 (37 citations), analyzing over 260,000 luminous red galaxies to deliver one of the most precise distance measurements to date. This milestone demonstrates the power of DESI to constrain the nature of dark energy. With a career defined by translating ambitious experimental designs into groundbreaking cosmological results, McDonald continues to shape the frontier of observational cosmology.