New CEO at the Ohio State James Cancer Hospital
COLUMBUS, Ohio (WCMH) -- There’s new leadership at the Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center – James Cancer Hospital.
Dr. Kimryn Rathmell officially stepped into the CEO role at the end of May. Now that she’s settled in, she’s sharing her vision and what brought her to Columbus.
“I am a scientist,” Rathmell said. “I really enjoy the intersection of health care and the discovery science that goes with it, so this had all those elements.”
Rathmell most recently served as director of the National Cancer Institute and, before that, a professor of medicine and biochemistry at Vanderbilt. She says it’s not just the opportunities for collaboration at OSU that drew her to the position, but also the academic setting.
“I very much value training and education and finding ways to bring early career scientists to the fold,” Rathmell said.
She’s hoping to use the network available through OSU – various departments, students and faculty – to help advance research and community outreach.
“When you meet a cancer patient, you and they are going to go through some of the roughest parts of their life together,” Rathmell said. “I want to be able to make that better and to make that better for that individual patient and as a scientist, be able to make that better for the next patient and the one after that.”
When speaking of the legacy she hopes to leave, she says it’s pretty straightforward.
“I hope that I impact individual people, to be honest,” Rathmell said. “I really like training; that’s one of the reasons I like coming back to school - there’s the students, residents, fellows – you want to feel like you have an impact on their ideas so their ideas can move forward.”