Seeking Calm, Columbia University Asks a Doctor to Lead

Dr. Katrina A. Armstrong was out of sorts.

It was April 15, 2013, her first day as the physician in chief of Massachusetts General Hospital, and she was grappling with the scale of her new job. She felt, she mused later, as if she had moved abroad.

Then two bombs exploded near the finish line of the Boston Marathon. Mass General prepared its emergency room as 127 of the wounded headed for the city’s top-level trauma centers, part of a response that ultimately earned Boston’s hospitals sweeping praise.

Dr. Armstrong, who was abruptly appointed as Columbia University’s interim president on Wednesday, has often talked about the aftermath of the terrorist attack on Boylston Street.

“We had had, and continue to have, this opportunity to be part of the healing that I think almost no other group got to do,” she said in a Mass General podcast in 2018. “And so to be able to heal both patients and a community that way, it was an incredible time to start.”

Now Dr. Armstrong is tasked with leading another community through the aftermath of a different kind of trauma, as Columbia grapples with the consequences of protests, accusations of antisemitism, an unwelcome turn in the global spotlight, and now the resignation of its president, Nemat Shafik.

Almost four months after encampments, a building seizure and a canceled commencement, the university campus remains largely closed, its gates guarded and its leaders wary of the turbulence the new semester may bring.

By turning to Dr. Armstrong, Columbia’s executive vice president for health and biomedical sciences since 2022, the university is getting an insider and a president who has publicly adopted a careful, cautious line since Hamas’s attack on Israel last October.

Two days after the attack, Dr. Armstrong and the deans of dental medicine, nursing and public health, declared that “the scale of the conflict engulfing Israel and Gaza and the impact on innocent civilians are horrifying.” They called for people “to come together and to embrace each other with compassion and empathy.”

And as Columbia reeled in April from protests, student arrests and a congressional hearing, the quartet, led by Dr. Armstrong, urged dialogue “informed by empathy and respect,” adding that “freedom of speech and rigorous debate are integral parts of our mission.”

But they also pointedly rejected “hateful language, calls for violence and the targeting of any individuals or groups based on their beliefs, ancestry, religion, gender identity or any other identity or affiliation.”

David Greenwald and Claire Shipman, the co-chairs of Columbia’s board of trustees, said in an open letter on Wednesday that they believed Dr. Armstrong brought “a truly exceptional skill set to our university and our current challenges.”

“She is a medical leader who cares deeply about community and society — a scientist and a humanist,” said Mr. Greenwald and Ms. Shipman, adding that the board had “regretfully” accepted Dr. Shafik’s resignation.

In her own letter, Dr. Shafik, who goes by Minouche, said she would work with Dr. Armstrong in pursuit of “an orderly transition.” Dr. Shafik’s resignation took effect on Wednesday.

Columbia did not immediately make Dr. Armstrong available for an interview.

The daughter of an Australian mother and an American father whose parents worked for the State Department, Dr. Armstrong was born in New Haven, Conn., but frequently moved as a child, living in places as varied as Buffalo, N.Y., and Tuscaloosa, Ala. (She has said she often won county fair contests where people tried, and failed, to guess where she was from.)

She finished high school near Birmingham, Ala., in 1982 and went to Yale University, where she worked in the dining hall and majored not in biology or chemistry but in architecture.

Within five years of graduation, though, she had earned a medical degree from Johns Hopkins University, where she completed a residency in internal medicine. During her time in Baltimore, she met her future husband, Thomas C. Randall, a gynecologic oncologist.

Dr. Armstrong soon headed for Philadelphia, where she was a fellow and then a faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania. She was the chief of the general internal medicine division and worked with Penn’s cancer center until her move to Boston in 2013, when she became physician in chief at Mass General, Harvard’s largest teaching hospital.

Columbia brought her to New York in 2022, when she became the chief executive of the university’s medical center, a sprawling empire that has long been an economic engine.

Although much of Dr. Armstrong’s research has been related to breast cancer, her record also shows longstanding interests in other parts of medicine. Her papers over the years have examined desegregation in academic medical centers and, long before the pandemic, distrust in the American health care system. More recently, she has been involved in projects in South Dakota related to palliative care and Covid-19 testing for Native Americans.

Until Wednesday, though, she had never been a university president. In the Ivy League, her interim status and medical background hardly make her an outlier.

Dr. J. Larry Jameson has been Penn’s interim leader since December, after M. Elizabeth Magill resigned amid a firestorm over her legalistic answers to Congress about antisemitism. Dr. Jameson, who briefly overlapped with Dr. Armstrong in Philadelphia, is expected to stay in his role into 2026.

Dr. Michael Kotlikoff, a veterinarian, began a two-year term as Cornell’s interim president on July 1.

And last month, Harvard announced that Alan M. Garber, a doctor who had been its interim president since January, would be its permanent leader through at least the 2026-27 academic year.

In a letter to the Columbia community on Wednesday, Dr. Armstrong noted that she was “acutely aware of the trials the university has faced over the past year.” But, she argued, the university “should neither understate their significance, nor allow them to define who we are and what we will become.”

The university, as it wound down Dr. Shafik’s 13-month tenure, did not say how long Dr. Armstrong might have to lead Columbia.