Barbara Stoll, M.D. ’75, has been named dean of the UTHealth Medical School, effective Oct. 1. A champion for pediatric global health, Stoll was previously the George W. Brumley, Jr., Professor and Chair of the Department of Pediatrics at the Emory University School of Medicine. She was also president and CEO of the Emory-Children’s Center and director of the Pediatric Center of Georgia, a joint venture between Emory and Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta.
She has authored more than 290 papers and has been continuously funded by the National Institutes of Health since 1991. As chair, she has led a department that has increased research funding by almost 500 percent, more than doubled its faculty, and has more than quadrupled named professorships and endowments.
After she received her MD degree from Yale she completed a pediatric internship and residency at Babies Hospital, Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center and a neonatology fellowship at Emory University School of Medicine. She received her AB degree from Barnard College.
Following her fellowship, she moved to Bangladesh where she was an associate scientist at the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research. She then joined the University of Goteborg, in Sweden as a visiting scientist, studying the systemic and mucosal immune response to diarrheal agents. Upon returning to the United States in 1984, she became an assistant professor in the Department of Medicine of the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, working on immune mechanisms of infectious disease prevention. In 1986, Stoll joined the Division of Neonatal-Perinatal Medicine at the Emory University School of Medicine. To expand her international efforts, she spent a year’s sabbatical at the World Health Organization in Geneva, Switzerland, raising awareness of the importance of neonatal morbidity and mortality in developing countries and developing guidelines for the care of newborns in resource poor settings.
Stoll’s research interests include neonatal clinical trials and the epidemiology of, diagnosis, and treatment of neonatal infectious diseases. She has spent over two decades studying the causes of morbidity and mortality among preterm and low birthweight infants, especially infectious diseases.