Chairs Named for Three Departments
Kevin Gardner, MD, PhD, professor of pathology & cell biology, has been named chair of the Department of Pathology & Cell Biology and pathologist-in-chief at NewYork-Presbyterian/CUIMC. He had served as interim chair of the department since July 1, 2023. He succeeds Kevin Roth, MD, PhD, who chaired the department for eight years.
Dr. Gardner joined VP&S in 2017 as senior vice chair of the Department of Pathology & Cell Biology. He also served as director of the Digital and Computational Pathology Laboratory and the Physician-Scientist Research Pathway in Pathology. In these roles he oversaw basic, translational, and clinical research within the department and led career development and mentoring for aspiring physician-scientists.
Before joining Columbia, Dr. Gardner was a senior investigator at the National Cancer Institute and scientific director of the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities, where he led health disparities research conducted by tenure-track investigators, staff scientists, and staff physicians.
While at the National Cancer Institute, he received two NIH Director’s Awards for his work defining the mechanisms of gene regulation and their role in the evolution of cancer and for conducting the first research to define a molecular mechanism linking metabolic imbalance with increased risk of breast cancer. Dr. Gardner is an elected member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation.
He received his PhD degree in cellular biology and anatomy from Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, where he also earned his MD degree. He completed a residency at the NIH and a fellowship at Johns Hopkins Hospital.
Joshua A. Gordon, MD, PhD, will return to Columbia in August as chair of the Department of Psychiatry, director of the New York State Psychiatric Institute, and psychiatrist-in-chief of the Columbia campus of NewYork-Presbyterian. Currently director of the National Institute of Mental Health, Dr. Gordon served on the VP&S faculty from 2004 until joining the NIH in 2016.
At VP&S he directed an active, NIH-funded research program in basic neuroscience relevant to mental illness, taught students and residents, and maintained a part-time practice in clinical psychiatry. He served as associate director of the adult psychiatry residency program, where he oversaw the neuroscience curriculum and administered research programs for residents, including the Leon Levy Foundation Psychiatric Neuroscience Fellowship Program.
At the NIMH, Dr. Gordon oversees more than 1,000 employees and a $2 billion annual budget. He has developed national scientific priorities in mental health research and expanded efforts to support and mentor early career scientists from diverse backgrounds. He also serves as chief of the integrative neuroscience section at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.
His research has direct relevance to schizophrenia, anxiety disorders, and depression. His work focuses on the analysis of neural activity in mice carrying mutations of relevance to psychiatric disease. His lab studies genetic models of diseases from an integrative neuroscience perspective and employs a range of systems neuroscience techniques, including in vivo imaging, behavioral recordings, and optogenetics.
Dr. Gordon was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2018. He earned MD and PhD degrees at the University of California, San Francisco, and completed residency and a research fellowship at Columbia.
Ajay Gupta, MD, joined VP&S as chair of the Department of Radiology on Feb. 1, 2024. A physician-scientist, Dr. Gupta is a board-certified radiologist specializing in neuroradiology. He joined VP&S from Weill Cornell Medicine, where he was vice chair for research in the Department of Radiology and professor of radiology and neuroscience. He succeeds Lawrence Schwartz, MD, who chaired the department for 13 years.
At Weill Cornell, Dr. Gupta led a research program to evaluate emerging neuroimaging techniques that may improve patient care. He has applied this investigative approach across a range of neurological disorders, focusing on stroke prevention and cerebrovascular disease assessment. As vice chair for research in radiology, he oversaw a nearly five-fold increase in federal research funding across the department, significant expansion of the clinical and translational research faculty, and modernization of research imaging infrastructure and facilities.
His research is supported by the NIH, and his contributions to imaging research have been published in more than 200 peer-reviewed articles.
Dr. Gupta has been recognized with numerous awards including the Distinguished Investigator Award from the Academy for Radiology & Biomedical Imaging Research and the Robert C. Watson Award for Teaching Excellence in Radiology. He is a senior editor for the American Journal of Neuroradiology.
Dr. Gupta received his MD degree from Johns Hopkins University and an MS degree in clinical & translation investigation from Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences. An internship at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center was followed by a diagnostic radiology residency and neuroradiology fellowship at Weill Cornell Medicine/NewYork-Presbyterian.