News

Gary Gottlieb, MD, MBA

President, Brigham and Women's Hospital

Gary L. Gottlieb, M.D., M.B.A., serves as President of Brigham and Women's/Faulkner Hospitals; a position assumed on March 1, 2002.  He is a Professor of Psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School.

Partners HealthCare recruited Dr. Gottlieb to become the first chairman of Partners Psychiatry in 1998 and he served in that capacity through 2005.  In 2000, he added the role of President of the North Shore Medical Center where he served until early 2002.

Prior to coming to Boston, Dr. Gottlieb spent 15 years in positions of increasing leadership in health care in Philadelphia. In 1983, he arrived at the University of Pennsylvania as a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholar. Through that program, he earned an M.B.A with Distinction in Health Care Administration from Penn's Wharton Graduate School of Business Administration. He credits the program with building a foundation of interest in health policy, management and academic leadership.

Dr. Gottlieb went on to establish Penn medical center's first program in geriatric psychiatry and developed it into a nationally recognized research, training and clinical program.
Dr. Gottlieb rose to become Executive Vice Chair and Interim Chair of Penn's Department of Psychiatry and the Health System's Associate Dean for Managed Care.  In 1994, he became Director and Chief Executive Officer of Friends Hospital in Philadelphia, the nation's oldest, independent, freestanding psychiatric hospital.

In addition to his noteworthy academic, clinical and management record, Dr. Gottlieb has published extensively in geriatric psychiatry and health care policy.  He is a past President of the American Association of Geriatric Psychiatry.

Dr. Gottlieb received his BS cum laude from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and his M.D. from the Albany Medical College of Union University in a six-year accelerated biomedical program. He completed his internship and residency and served as Chief Resident at New York University/Bellevue Medical Center.
Now, as a recognized community leader in Boston, Dr. Gottlieb also focuses his attention on workforce development and disparities in health care.  He was appointed by Mayor Thomas Menino as chairman of the Private Industry Council, the city's workforce development board, which partners with education, labor, higher education, the community and government, to provide oversight and leadership to public and private workforce development programs.  In 2004-2005, he served as co-chair of the Mayor Task Force to Eliminate Health Disparities.

For Dr. Gottlieb, one of his personal missions is to improve access to the best possible health care for everyone.

Anthony D. Whittemore, MD

Chief Medical Officer, Brigham and Women's Hospital

Anthony D. (Andy) Whittemore, MD, is chief medical officer (CMO) at Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH), a position he assumed January 1, 1999. Dr. Whittemore joined the medical staff of BWH in 1976 and served as the director of the Surgical Residency Training Program from 1980 until 1991. He then served as chief of the Division of Vascular Surgery and Director of the BWH Vascular Center. Dr. Whittemore also served as vice-chair of the Department of Surgery and is Professor of  Surgery at Harvard Medical School. He maintains a surgical practice focused on aortic and carotid arterial reconstruction.

Dr. Whittemore has served as chairman of both the Medical Staff Executive and Quality Assurance/Risk  Management committees at BWH. These roles  provided an opportunity to initiate several hospital wide programs that have made BWH a national leader in patient safety, including the application of bar code technology for medication administration and implementation of a web-based medical error reporting system. He was instrumental in creating the BWH professionalism program, the Center for Bioethics, and a physician leadership program in conjunction with Harvard Business School.

A member of 20 professional societies including the American Medical Association, American College of Surgeons, American Surgical Association, and Society of University Surgeons, Dr. Whittemore has served as  President of the Boston Surgical Society, New England Society for Vascular Surgery and the Society for Vascular Surgery. He was  Treasurer and then Vice-President of the American Surgical Association and its Foundation. His publications exceed 100 peer-reviewed scientific papers and an equal number of textbook chapters. He served on the editorial boards of numerous publications including the Journal of Vascular Surgery, Journal of the American College of Surgeons, Vascular Surgery, and Cardiovascular Surgery.  He served as editor-in-chief of Advances in Vascular Surgery from its inception in 1991 until 2001.

A graduate of Trinity College in Hartford, Dr. Whittemore received his MD from The College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University in New York. Following a Vascular Fellowship at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston, he served in the US Navy as chief of Vascular Surgery for the Sixth Fleet at the Naval Regional Medical Center, Portsmouth, Virginia. He then returned to Boston and rejoined the faculty at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital.

Kate Walsh

Chief Operating Officer

Kate Walsh is executive vice president and chief operating officer of Brigham and Women's Hospital, a position she assumed Nov. 15, 2004.

Prior to her appointment at BWH, Walsh served as chief operating officer for Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research, a position she held from 2002 to 2004. Before that, she was senior vice president of Medical Services and the Cancer Center at Massachusetts General Hospital beginning in 1994. She previously held other posts at Massachusetts General Hospital, including vice president for Medical Services and Primary Care, and assistant general director for Medical Services.

Walsh is currently treasurer of the board of directors for the Kenneth B. Schwartz Center and a member of the board of directors for Wellesley's A Better Chance Program. She also is a member of the Board of Visitors for Northeastern School of Business.

Walsh earned a bachelors degree from Yale University and masters in Public Health.

Mairead Hickey, PHD, RN, FAHA

Chief Nursing Officer
Senior Vice President of Patient Care Services

Mairead Hickey, PhD, RN, FAHA, is chief nursing officer and senior vice president of Patient Care Services at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH), a position she assumed October 3, 2005. 

Nursing has been Hickey’s life's work since graduating from Boston College in 1972 when she became a staff nurse and nursing instructor at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, which later merged with other Boston hospitals to form BWH. She then moved to Connecticut where she earned her PhD and studied risk related behaviors in myocardial infarction patients and was an associate Professor and chair of the Graduate Program for clinical nurse specialists at Yale University.

Hickey returned to BWH in 1992 to create the Nursing Research Program, and through 1999 she held several director-level positions, including Patient Care Services, Research and Outcome Measurement, and Quality Management Services. She was vice president of Women’s Health and Specialty Services from 1999 to October, 2005.  

In addition to serving as Chief Nursing Officer at BWH, Hickey has held adjunct faculty appointments at Harvard Medical School, Harvard School of Public Health and Boston College School of Nursing. She is widely published with dozens of peer-reviewed papers on topics such as quality and safety in nursing care and the needs of families of critically ill patients to her credit.

Lisa S. Ponton, JD, MSW

Vice President of Human Resources

Lisa S. Ponton, JD, MSW, is vice president of Human Resources at Brigham and Women's Hospital, a position she assumed Nov. 1, 2005.

Prior to her appointment at BWH, Ponton served for eight years as senior director of Human Resource Programs at Vanderbilt University and Vanderbilt University Medical Center where she led the employee relations function, recruitment services, organizational effectiveness, human resources for the off-site physician practices and the international area.

A lawyer by training, Ponton began her career at United States Steel Corporation. She also was director of Employee Relations for Magee Women's Hospital, director of Human Resources for LEGENT, a software development company and was senior consultant at KCRS & HRU Consulting, offering customized human resource management for clients including University of Pittsburgh, Mercy Health System and Mellon Bank.

A graduate of Spelman College, Ponton earned her master's degree in Social Work and her JD from the University of Pittsburgh.

Michael Gustafson, MD, MBA

Senior Vice President for Clinical Excellence

Michael Gustafson, MD, MBA, is the senior vice president for Clinical Excellence at Brigham and Women's/Faulkner Hospitals (BW/F), a position he assumed on May 2, 2004. 

Gustafson established the Center for Clinical Excellence in 2001 and since then has made enormous contributions to the BW/F community by developing and coordinating strategies for performance improvement, patient safety, quality of care, and performance measurement and analysis.

In addition to serving as the vice president for Clinical Excellence, Gustafson is also an instructor in the Department of Surgery at Harvard Medical School, with active research interests including the relationships between volume of surgical procedures and quality, measurement of risk-adjusted surgical outcomes, and the application of human factors and systems engineering concepts in the operating room.

Gustafson has published many original articles in peer-reviewed national journals on topics such as basic science research, clinical management, and quality improvement.  He has been invited to speak at regional and national meetings on such topics as measuring healthcare quality, bringing a balanced scorecard approach to healthcare institutions, improving quality within surgery and introducing patient safety concepts into an academic medical center.

Gustafson received his MD degree at West Virginia University, and completed his General Surgery residency at Brigham & Women's Hospital.  He later went on to become one of the first surgeons to ever receive an MBA degree from Harvard Business School.