Columbia's Now-Interim President Katrina Armstrong speaking at the Penn LDI 50th Anniversary Symposium in 2017.
Columbia University President and former Penn professor Nemat “Minouche” Shafik resigned from her position on Wednesday evening, and Perelman School of Medicine graduate and long-time researcher Katrina Armstrong has been appointed interim president of the university.
Shafik is the third Ivy League president to resign in the past year — following former Penn President Liz Magill last December and former Harvard University president Claudine Gay in January — in response to protests related to the Israel-Hamas war. She previously served as a visiting professor at the Wharton School in the spring of 1996.
Armstrong currently serves as chief executive officer of the Columbia University Irving Medical Center, dean of the Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, and executive vice president for health and biomedical sciences. She previously spent 17 years at Penn.
Armstrong earned a master’s degree in clinical epidemiology from the Medical School in 1998. She has since served in a variety of leadership positions at Penn including 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.
“As I step into this role, I am acutely aware of the trials the [u]niversity has faced over the past year,” Armstrong wrote in an email to the Columbia University community following Shafik’s announcement. “We should neither understate their significance, nor allow them to define who we are and what we will become.”
At Penn, Armstrong bridged epidemiology, economics, genetics, and more to improve care and reduce inequity in healthcare. Her research 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.”
Armstrong also designed her own courses on clinical decision-making and created a master’s degree in health policy research at Penn.
In 2017, Armstrong was awarded Penn LDI John M. Eisenberg Pioneer Award at the LDI 50th Anniversary Symposium, an event that was opened with remarks from interim Penn President — and then Medical School Dean — Larry Jameson. In 2020, Armstrong gave a special address at the graduation ceremony for the Medical School, which was held virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Magill resigned as Penn president on Dec. 9, 2023 amid mounting pressure over her response to on-campus antisemitism last fall, including her controversial remarks at a Dec. 5, 2023 Congressional hearing, when she said it was "context dependent" when asked whether calling for the genocide of Jewish people violates Penn’s code of conduct.
Columbia follows Penn and Harvard in picking a medical school affiliate to serve as interim president: Interim Penn President Larry Jameson served as the dean of the Medical School for over a decade, and Harvard President Alan Garber — who recently had the “interim” tag removed from his role — has served as a professor at Harvard Medical School.
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