Announcement Regarding Dr. Donald Landry
Dear Colleagues:
We are writing to inform you that Donald W. Landry, MD, PhD, will step down from his positions as Physician-in-Chief at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Irving Medical Center and Chair of the Department of Medicine at the Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons on April 1, 2023. We have asked Ali Gharavi, MD, Professor of Medicine at VP&S, chief of the Division of Nephrology, founding director of the Center for Precision Medicine and Genomics, and interim director of the Institute for Genomic Medicine, to serve as interim Chair of Medicine beginning in April, when Dr. Landry steps down. We are grateful to Dr. Gharavi for accepting our interim appointment and for serving in this capacity until a national search is completed and Dr. Landry’s successor is in place.
Dr. Landry completed his PhD in Organic Chemistry at Harvard University with Nobel Laureate R.B. Woodward in 1979, his MD from the Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1983, and residency training in Internal Medicine at the Massachusetts General Hospital. He joined the Columbia faculty in 1985 as Instructor, completed Nephrology training en passant, and rose to full Professor of Medicine with tenure in 2004. Dr. Landry was the founding director of the Division of Experimental Therapeutics, which brings synthetic organic chemists to the Department of Medicine, and he served as director of the Division of Nephrology, where he started the sub-subspecialty of ICU nephrology. Dr. Landry’s contributions to our institutions and to medicine have inspired students and provided the kind of leadership for which Columbia and NewYork-Presbyterian are recognized around the world.
For nearly four decades, Dr. Landry has conducted exceptional pioneering research and forged new medical approaches to intractable health challenges. His work on cocaine overdose and addiction led to the discovery of the first artificial enzyme to degrade cocaine; the accompanying report published in Science in 1993 was recognized by the American Chemical Society as one of the top 25 papers in the world for that year. His enzyme-based treatment for cocaine overdose is in clinical trials through licensee Tonix Pharmaceuticals. The publications, grants, U.S. patents and intellectual property spawned by Dr. Landry’s research are vast. A molecule made in his lab was licensed as the founding technology of the Columbia start-up Applied Therapeutics, which went public and became the first Columbia start-up to trade on NASDAQ.
Dr. Landry’s observation discovery of vasopressin deficiency syndrome in vasodilatory shock through his clinical work in 1995 led to the use of vasopressin to treat septic shock and vasodilatory shock after cardiopulmonary bypass and changed clinical practice for these lethal conditions. This breakthrough created time to treat underlying medical issues that was previously unavailable to physicians.
Aware of reports on pump-based continuous dialysis in the ICU, Dr. Landry built a continuous veno-venous hemodiafiltration apparatus from a BM11 blood pump and iVAC components, in-serviced 100 ICU nurses, and introduced continuous renal replacement therapy (CRRT) to treat renal failure in patients with shock in our intensive care units. When commercial machines became available, NewYork-Presbyterian was already a national leader for CRRT.
Dr. Landry’s work as a biomedical researcher and clinician is matched in significance by the enduring institutional contributions he has made to the Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons and to NewYork-Presbyterian. The Department of Medicine chaired by Dr. Landry for the past 16 years doubled the number of faculty and is the largest of our clinical departments with 13 divisions, a faculty of more than 600 full-time physicians and scientists, a house staff of more than 150, and more than 150 fellows. The Department’s education and teaching efforts are nationally recognized and its internal medicine residency remains one of the finest in the country. The NIH-funded research of the department increased by 300 percent while he was chair, with 2022 NIH support to the department exceeding $206 million, and an NIH ranking among departments of medicine that rose from fifteenth to the top five, and this year to number three in the nation. He has served on the admissions committee for VP&S for 28 years.
Dr. Landry has remained active in teaching and lecturing at the Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons and was founding director of the immensely successful Doris Duke Clinical Research Fellowship Program at VP&S.
He is a member of the American Chemical Society, the New York Academy of Sciences, the American Society for Clinical Investigation, and the Association of American Physicians, and he is an elected member of the National Academy of Inventors. He is a past member of the President’s Council of Bioethics and received the Presidential Citizens Medal, the nation’s second highest civilian award, “for his diverse and pioneering research and his efforts to improve the well-being of his fellow man.”
We are fortunate to be graced by the presence of exceptional individuals whose recognized leadership in their respective fields is, in many important respects, what distinguishes and defines our institutions. Dr. Landry has been one of those leaders for the better part of four decades. Post chairmanship, he will be the founding director of the Department of Medicine’s newest research center, the Burch-Lodge Center for Human Longevity. Please join us in expressing our gratitude and admiration for Dr. Landry’s profound contributions and the lasting legacy he has established in the Department of Medicine, the Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, NewYork-Presbyterian, and Columbia University Irving Medical Center.
Sincerely,
Katrina Armstrong, MD
Dean of the Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons
Executive Vice President for Health and Biomedical Sciences, Columbia University
Steven J. Corwin, MD
President and Chief Executive Officer, NewYork-Presbyterian