AAMC Announces 2026-27 Board of Directors

• Press Release

The AAMC has announced its 2026-27 Board of Directors. The incoming board's term begins Nov. 10, 2026, and will end at the conclusion of Learn Serve Lead: The AAMC Annual Meeting in November 2027.

Nita Ahuja, MD, MBA, FACS, dean of the University of Wisconsin (UW) School of Medicine and Public Health and the vice chancellor for medical affairs at UW-Madison, has been elected to serve as chair of the AAMC Board of Directors. She will succeed Michael Waldrum, MD, MSc, MBA, dean of the Brody School of Medicine at East Carolina University (ECU) and chief executive officer of ECU Health, who will become immediate past chair. Dennis Murphy, MHA, president and chief executive officer of Indiana University Health, has been named chair-elect and will succeed Ahuja next year.

Ahuja is the 10th dean of the University of Wisconsin (UW) School of Medicine and Public Health, the state's only public medical school. In this role, she leads the nation's first integrated school of medicine and public health. She also serves as chair or vice chair in alternating terms on the board of the UW Hospitals and Clinics Authority, which governs UW Health. Prior to joining UW, Ahuja was the chair of the Department of Surgery at the Yale School of Medicine and the surgeon-in-chief for the Yale New Haven Health System. Ahuja obtained her medical degree at the Duke University School of Medicine and completed her residency training, a fellowship in surgical oncology, and Master of Business Administration at Johns Hopkins University. A fellow of the American College of Surgeons and elected member of the National Academy of Medicine, Ahuja is a cancer-care innovator whose treatment approaches and research have garnered international recognition. She is a past chair of the AAMC Council of Faculty and Academic Societies Administrative Board.

Murphy joined the Indiana University Health system (IU Health) in 2013 as chief operating officer, overseeing the operation of IU Health entities throughout the system. He was appointed president in 2015 and assumed the role of CEO in May 2016. An experienced health care executive, Murphy came to IU Health from Northwestern Memorial HealthCare in Chicago, where he served as chief operating officer and executive vice president. Prior to joining Northwestern Memorial HealthCare, Murphy was vice president of ambulatory services and financial planning for University of Chicago Hospitals, and before that he spent 10 years at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore in a variety of roles, from administrative fellow to administrator of the Department of Medicine. Murphy is an adjunct faculty member in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Indiana University Richard M. Fairbanks School of Public Health. He currently serves as chair of the AAMC Council of Academic Health System Executives.

In addition to the chair and chair-elect, the AAMC Board of Directors includes the AAMC president and CEO, immediate past chair, and chairs and chairs-elect from the association's three member councils: Council of Deans, Council of Academic Health System Executives, and Council of Faculty and Academic Societies. The board also has nine at-large members, including a medical student, a resident physician, a junior faculty member, and two "public" members not affiliated with the AAMC, a medical school, or an academic health system.

The members of the 2026-27 AAMC Board of Directors are:

Chair:
Nita Ahuja, MD, MBA
University of Wisconsin

Chair-elect:
Dennis Murphy, MHA
Indiana University Health

Immediate Past Chair:
Michael Waldrum, MD, MSc, MBA
ECU Health

President and CEO:
David J. Skorton, MD
Association of American Medical Colleges

Monica L. Baskin, PhD, MS
Virginia Commonwealth University

David N. Bernstein, MD, PhD, MBA, MEI
Massachusetts General Hospital

Ralph Boyd, JD
SOME (So Others Might Eat) [retired]

Allison Brashear, MD, MBA
University at Buffalo

Dawn Bulgarella, MSHA
UAB Health System

Michael Dandorph, MBA
Tufts Medicine

Arthur R. Derse, MD, JD
Medical College of Wisconsin

Michael L. Good, MD
University of Utah

Emma Hart, MD
University of New Mexico

Rachel S. Nash, MD
Cooper University Health Care

J. Renee Navarro, MD, PharmD
University of California, San Francisco

Dana Gelb Safran, ScD, ScM
National Quality Forum [retired]

Marc M. Triola, MD
NYU

J. Adrian Tyndall, MD, MPH
Western Michigan University

Gloria R. Xue, MS
Indiana University