Senior Vice Chancellor for Health Sciences and John and Gertrude Petersen Dean of the School of Medicine

The University of Pittsburgh (Pitt) seeks an accomplished academic health sciences leader to serve as its next Senior Vice Chancellor for the Health Sciences and John and Gertrude Petersen Dean of the School of Medicine (SVC/dean). This is among the most prestigious leadership roles in American academic medicine: the SVC/dean leads six health sciences schools, serves as dean of one of the country's leading medical schools, and holds primary responsibility for the University's relationship with UPMC, a $36 billion integrated health system that grew out of Pitt and remains its principal clinical partner.

Pitt's health sciences enterprise is operating at the strongest point in its history. Pitt's six health sciences schools—Dental Medicine, Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, Medicine, Nursing, Pharmacy, and Public Health—enroll 6,780 students and employ 7,101 faculty, researchers, and staff. In FY2025, the University ranked seventh nationally in NIH funding at $669.7 million, and health sciences research expenditures crossed $1 billion for the first time. The health sciences account for nearly 82 percent of the University's externally funded research and development. The School of Medicine ranked eighth among medical schools in the Blue Ridge Institute for Medical Research rankings, and all six schools ranked in the top 20 in their categories.

The next SVC/dean inherits that platform at a period of unusual uncertainty in academic medicine. The federal research funding environment has become materially less predictable, health systems nationally face pressure on operating margins and reimbursement, and competition for physician-scientists and early-career basic science faculty has intensified. Pitt enters this period with institutional commitment behind it: the University's strategic plan and its “It’s Possible at Pitt” pillar commit the University to lead the life sciences century at the convergence of health, AI, and technology, to power a healthy future, and to transform assistive technologies to enable human achievement.

The University has launched its first comprehensive fundraising campaign in more than 13 years, and the health sciences will carry a substantial share of it. A successful campaign would give the next SVC/dean substantial, flexible resources for new science at a moment when such resources are scarce across academic medicine.

The partnership with UPMC is the defining structural feature of the role. Pitt and UPMC are separate institutions bound by an unusually close affiliation. UPMC grew out of the University and now oversees all clinical activity, including University of Pittsburgh Physicians, the consolidated practice plan through which the School of Medicine's clinical faculty see patients. UPMC employs 100,000 people across more than 40 hospitals and 800 outpatient sites in Pennsylvania, New York, and Maryland. UPMC supports more than 1,900 residents and clinical fellows across all the major clinical specialties in the nation's second-largest residency/fellowship training program.

Few positions in American academic medicine offer this combination of scientific depth, institutional momentum, and clinical scale. The role calls for a leader equally at home in the laboratory, the clinic, the boardroom, and the wider University: a scholar whose own record commands the respect of a faculty that includes members of the National Academies; an executive capable of setting direction across six schools with distinct missions, cultures, and financial structures; a University leader who takes a full part in the Chancellor's senior team, places the success of the University as a whole first, and contributes to decisions that reach well beyond the health sciences; and a partner who can work alongside UPMC's leadership, advocating unambiguously for the academic mission, to make two extraordinary institutions worth more together than apart.

Pitt seeks a leader who will be present and visible in laboratories and clinics and in the communities the health sciences serve, with students and trainees, donors and policymakers, and colleagues across the wider University. The next SVC/dean will bring an instinct for building: for recruiting exceptional people, for assembling them into teams that reach across departments and schools, for creating the conditions in which they do their best work, and for opening the pathways that carry discovery from the bench toward patients. Pitt is a highly collaborative place where authority is distributed, and progress depends on persuasion and shared credit, and the next SVC/dean will be someone who thrives in that setting. Above all, the University is looking for someone who can articulate a compelling vision for what academic medicine at Pitt becomes over the next decade, and who brings the energy, judgment, and collaborative temperament to realize it.

The University of Pittsburgh has retained Isaacson, Miller, a national executive search firm, to assist with this recruitment. Inquiries, nominations, and applications should be directed to the firm below.

John Isaacson and Ariannah Mirick are leading this search with Katie White and Madeleine Ruth.