Nabel To Lead Two Boston Hospitals

Nationally-renowned cardiologist Elizabeth G. Nabel will take the helm of two major Boston teaching hospitals—including the Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital—administrators announced last Thursday.

Nabel is currently director of the $3 billion National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute at the National Institutes of Health.

According to selected for both her research and administrative experience, according to G. Marshall Moriarty ’64, chairman of the Brigham’s Board of Trustees. “We have a lot of high-powered researchers,” Moriarty said. “We need someone who can deal with the faculty members as an equal.”

Nabel, who Moriarty said emphasized patient care during her term at NIH, has also worked personally with local residents in Washington, D.C. This experience, he said, has prepared her to lead a premier research institution that also serves as a community hospital for the Jamaica Plain, Dorchester, and Roxbury neighborhods.

“She has the whole package,” Moriarty said.

For Nabel, who completed her residency at Brigham over 20 years ago, accepting this position represents a return to her roots within the Harvard medical community. “I see this as an opportunity to come home in many ways,” she said, adding that she had met her husband and given birth to her first child at Brigham.

In 2007, Nabel had the opportunity to return to Harvard when she was considered for Dean of Harvard Medical School, but she did not pursue the post due to family commitments. Now that her youngest daughter is about to graduate from high school, Nabel is no longer as concerned about uprooting her home in D.C. and relocating to Boston.

As part of her new position, Nabel will also oversee a second institution, the Tufts-affiliated Faulkner Hospital, which is also run by Partners Healthcare, a conglomerate that oversees several local medical institutions.

Nabel said that both Brigham and Faulkner will continue to emphasize innovation in diagnostics, therapeutics, and other areas of patient care.

Given the current economic climate, the hospitals will face inevitable fiscal challenges, Nabel said, but these are the same difficulties that hospital presidents across the country must address.

Still, patients and their families will continue to remain at the forefront of the hospitals’ mission.

“We will make sure we do not lose sight of those very important values,” she said.

Nabel, who will spend the first few months of her tenure learning about the hospitals’ current clinical and research programs, said that setting a specific agenda would be “premature” at this point.

—Staff writer Laura G. Mirviss can be reached at lmirviss@fas.harvard.edu.