Katrina Armstrong, MD, became the interim president of Columbia University on August 14, 2024. She also leads Columbia University’s health and biomedical sciences campus, serving since 2022 as chief executive officer of the Columbia University Irving Medical Center, which includes the Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, the School of Nursing, the College of Dental Medicine, and the Mailman School of Public Health. She is executive vice president for Health and Biomedical Sciences for Columbia University and the Harold and Margaret Hatch Professor of the University. Dr. Armstrong is an internationally recognized investigator in medical decision-making, quality of care, and cancer prevention and outcomes; an award-winning teacher; and a practicing primary care physician. Her scholarship bridges the fields of epidemiology, psychology, economics, and genetics, among other disciplines, to better understand how to advance scientific discovery and innovation to improve outcomes and eliminate health inequity. She was recruited to Columbia in 2022 as the first woman to serve as dean of the Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons and as CEO of Columbia’s Irving Medical Center.
A Commitment to Addressing Inequity Through Research and Education
Dr. Armstrong’s research focuses on how social forces shape the delivery, distribution, and outcomes of health and health care. Through innovative scholarship, Dr. Armstrong has helped transform understanding of cancer, genomics, and health care disparities. She has identified ways to improve cancer care using observational data, modeling, and personalized medicine. Her work has focused on cancer risk and prevention in Black and Latinx patients, examined racial inequities in genetic testing and other services and analyzed the roles that segregation, discrimination, and distrust play in the health of marginalized populations. Her most recent research studied disparities in rural areas and included partnerships with Lakota tribal communities and organizations in western South Dakota.
In 2013, Dr. Armstrong was recruited to Harvard University to chair the Department of Medicine, Harvard Medical School’s largest department, and to serve as physician-in-chief at Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital. She was also the Jackson Professor of Clinical Medicine at Harvard Medical School and professor of epidemiology at the T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Dr. Armstrong was the first woman physician-in-chief at Massachusetts General Hospital when she joined Harvard.
In Harvard’s Department of Medicine, which records 1.2 million ambulatory visits annually, she oversaw the work of 2,000 faculty, residents, and fellows in 10 clinical divisions and 11 research units. She led the department’s undergraduate and graduate medical education programs and founded the Center for Educational Innovation and Scholarship to promote scholarship and new approaches to medical education. She developed a new educational program, called the Pathways program, that linked science and clinical training to drive discovery and cure, and launched a training program in rural health leadership. She demonstrated a commitment to educating, recruiting, and retaining diverse talent by creating programs devoted to pipeline development, flexible career pathways, coaching, mentorship, and sponsorship.
Dr. Armstrong began her academic career at the University of Pennsylvania, where over her 17 years as a faculty member she took on a series of leadership roles, with the goal of bringing together the diverse strengths of the University to address major societal challenges. In service of this goal, she became the director of research at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics, the chief of general internal medicine, the associate director of the Abramson Cancer Center, and the co-director of the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program. She also built a research program focusing on medical decision-making, quality of care, and cancer prevention and outcomes; designed and led courses on clinical decision-making; and established a master’s degree in health policy research.
Dr. Armstrong received a BA degree in architecture from Yale University where, through her architecture and pre-med studies, she learned how social, environmental, and structural forces influence individual well-being and outcomes. She then spent a year at the National Institutes of Health before beginning medical school at Johns Hopkins University.
Her time at medical school and residency training at Johns Hopkins was defined by the height of the HIV epidemic, where she experienced firsthand the potential of scientific discovery to save lives and the critical importance of ensuring everyone has access to the benefits of those discoveries. As chief resident she focused on transforming the medical educational experience for fellow and future residents. After her residency, Dr. Armstrong moved to the University of Pennsylvania, where she pursued further research training in epidemiology and health policy research and earned a master’s degree in clinical epidemiology.
Over the course of her career, Dr. Armstrong’s accomplishments have been recognized by election to the National Academy of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Association of American Physicians, and the American Society for Clinical Investigation. She has been honored with awards that include the Outstanding Junior Investigator of the Year Award from the Society of General Internal Medicine, the Outstanding Investigator Award from the American Federation of Medical Research, and the Alice Hersh Award from Academy Health.