Katrina Armstrong, M.D.

Katrina Armstrong, MD, leads Columbia University’s medical campus as Chief Executive Officer of the Columbia University Irving Medical Center (CUIMC) and Dean of the Faculties of Health Sciences and the Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons. CUIMC includes the Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons (VP&S), 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 in the Faculty of Medicine. Dr. Armstrong is the 25th dean of VP&S, founded in 1767 as the nation’s second medical school but the first in the nation to award an MD degree. She is the first woman to lead Columbia’s medical school and medical center, assuming her new roles on March 1, 2022.

Before joining Columbia, Dr. Armstrong was chair of the Department of Medicine and Physician-in-Chief of Harvard-affiliated 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 a department that 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 also oversaw the department’s undergraduate and graduate medical education programs. Her academic career began at the University of Pennsylvania, where over 17 years, she served in many roles, including physician-scientist fellow, professor, chief of general internal medicine, associate director of the Abramson Cancer Center, co-director of the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program, and director of research at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics.

Dr. Armstrong received a BA degree in architecture from Yale University, an MD degree from Johns Hopkins University, and an MS degree in clinical epidemiology from the University of Pennsylvania. She completed her residency training in internal medicine at Johns Hopkins. She is an elected member of 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.