Katrina Armstrong
Katrina Armstrong, MD, is interim president of Columbia University. She also leads Columbia University’s health and biomedical sciences campus, serving since 2022 as chief executive officer of Columbia University Irving Medical Center. She is executive vice president for Health and Biomedical Sciences for Columbia University and the Harold and Margaret Hatch Professor of the University.
She 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 financed her undergraduate degree through scholarships, loans, and working in the freshman dining hall. She chose to pursue a career in medicine given its commitment to bring science and humanism to the pursuit of better outcomes for all.
After graduation she spent a year at the National Institutes of Health in a laboratory studying diabetes and eye disease 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 everyone having 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, earned a master’s degree in clinical epidemiology, and joined the faculty in the School of Medicine.
At the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Armstrong built a research program focusing on medical decision-making, quality of care, and cancer prevention and outcomes. Her laboratory bridges the fields of epidemiology, psychology, economics, and genetics, among other disciplines, with the aim of understanding how to advance scientific discovery and innovation to improve outcomes and eliminate inequity. Through innovative research, 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.
As a tenured faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Armstrong also designed and led courses on clinical decision-making and established a master’s degree in health policy research. Over her 17 years as a faculty member at Penn, Dr. Armstrong 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.
In 2013, Dr. Armstrong was recruited to Harvard University to lead the Department of Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital. At Harvard, she was 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 2013. In that Department, 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 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.
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.