Lee Goldman, an internationally recognized epidemiologist and cardiologist, will join Columbia on August 1 as the executive vice president for health and biomedical sciences and dean of the faculties of health sciences and medicine. He will head the Columbia University Medical Center, with its four professional schools: the College of Physicians and Surgeons, the College of Dental Medicine, the School of Nursing, and the Mailman School of Public Health. Goldman succeeds Gerald D. Fischbach, who announced this spring he would step down in June.
Currently the associate dean for clinical affairs at the University of California in San Francisco (UCSF), Goldman is a pioneer in the application of statistical analysis in clinical care, having developed innovative predictive models used by health researchers and clinicians around the world. The most popular of these models are the so-called Goldman index for assessing the cardiac risk in surgeries unrelated to the heart and the Goldman criteria for helping determine if patients with chest pain require hospital admission. Among Goldman’s more than 400 publications are 20 first- or senior-authored articles in the New England Journal of Medicine.
At UCSF, Goldman chairs the medicine department, which receives more financing in grants and contracts from the National Institutes of Health than any other academic department in the nation.
At Columbia, Goldman will be the Harold and Margaret Hatch Professor of the University, professor of medicine at the College of Physicians and Surgeons, and professor of epidemiology at the Mailman School of Public Health.
President Lee Bollinger calls Goldman “an extraordinary leader” and praises him for “ably bringing together the highest quality medical care for patients, pathbreaking research, a commitment to the wider community, as well as management skills that are absolutely essential to the success of a large academic medical complex.”
As head of the Columbia University Medical Center, Goldman will oversee more than 2000 full-time faculty in 86 departments and programs, 64 centers and institutes, 40 biomedical research and treatment centers, affiliations with two dozen hospitals, and an annual operating budget of $1.2 billion.
“My responsibility is to create a diverse environment where the best clinicians, researchers, teachers, and students can have the resources and institutional support to expand the frontiers of scientific knowledge, improve health care for our society, and train the next generation to sustain and enhance this mission,” says Goldman. “It’s an enormous challenge and a wonderful opportunity.” Goldman is president of the Association of Professors of Medicine, lead editor of the Cecil Textbook of Medicine, and coeditor of Hospital Medicine and Primary Cardiology. He is married to Jill S. Goldman, who has been a genetics counselor in the UCSF neurology department and an assistant clinical professor in the UCSF school of nursing.
