A Message from Katrina Armstrong
Dear Colleagues,
My first few days here have been filled with warm welcomes and productive discussions about the challenges that we can transform into opportunities to advance health and science.
As I said in my remarks at Monday’s welcome assembly, I could not be more honored and humbled to be joining the Columbia community at this important time. It is an important time because the pandemic showed how we can meet challenges through great medicine and science. It is also an important time because we all agree that we need to do more than advance health care and science: We need to ensure those advances benefit everyone. By bringing an equity lens to all that we do, our science, clinical care, education, and community health programs can lead in eliminating the disparities in health and health care that have grown so dramatically over the last decades.
Many efforts have been underway since CUIMC began discussions in 2020 on strategies to eliminate racism, sexism, and inequity. One example I learned about this week is the VP&S Department of Neurology’s plan to create a resident and faculty practice that combines outpatient care in the Neurological Institute for adults and the Harkness Pavilion for children. This practice will see patients with all types of insurance, bringing residents and faculty together to ensure equal care for all patients and the optimal training environment for students, residents, and fellows. The leadership of the Department of Neurology, including the Chair, Richard Mayeux, MD, and Chief of Staff, Jide Williams, MD, have long advocated for such a clinic, and they and the department are to be commended for developing a plan that enables Columbia and NYP to move forward in this effort together.
In response to the “CUIMC Roadmap for Anti-Racism in Healthcare and Health Sciences,” remarkable progress has been made on many fronts: Senior Vice President Anne Taylor, MD, reports that since January 2021, we have hired 265 new CUIMC faculty; 15% are underrepresented in medicine (URiM). At the leadership level, we have recruited two vice deans, an associate dean, and an assistant dean who are URiM. We have developed new pipeline programs, opened an Office of Professionalism, and identified space to establish the CUIMC Community Center to expand our community service.
Every school and most departments at CUIMC have appointed diversity officers to implement programs to address racism, sexism, and other inequities in hiring, advancement, student recruitment, patient care, and curricula. Programs are underway to develop a body of scholarship in health care disparities and social justice and to encourage greater community service. I am committed to working with you to advance these programs to ensure that CUIMC stands for equity, inclusion, and excellence.
In observance of Women’s History Month, I want to note the role gender equity has in our overall goal of an inclusive workplace. This week I had the privilege of attending the CUIMC Women in Science Symposium, which celebrates the role women scientists have played in scientific advances, contributions that often go uncredited. This series created by Dr. Taylor and her team promotes the work of women scientists across the four CUIMC schools. At this week’s event, Katalin Karikó, PhD, gave remarks about overcoming adversity in science. She was at Columbia this week to receive, along with Drew Weissman, MD, PhD, the 2021 Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize for their pioneering work on messenger RNA vaccines for COVID-19.
As I shared in my remarks on Monday, I believe that academic health centers like ours have both an opportunity and a responsibility to deliver on our values—the power of science to make the world a better place, the fundamental role of empathy and compassion not just in our roles as healers but in our work together, and the pursuit of equity and justice grounded in listening to the communities we serve.
We are all here to improve human health. We will reach our goals by investing in research and education, creating new approaches to treatment and prevention that will improve health, and training the young people who will be our community’s leaders in the future. We also have an opportunity to create a new paradigm where our advances raise the health of everyone, where we reach all patients and communities in need. We all understand that this is a complex and challenging endeavor, but this medical center has a history of bringing diverse and committed talent to the most challenging problems that exist, as the pandemic illustrated. We are a medical center that comes to work every day in service to our patients and our communities, and we support each other in that important and difficult work.
In closing, I welcome your input as we work together on our common goals.
All my best,
Katrina Armstrong, MD
Chief Executive Officer, Columbia University Irving Medical Center
Dean of the Faculties of Health Sciences and the Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons