The Reporter: February 1996, Vol.7, No.1
Medical School's First Female Clinical Chair

You might call 1996 a year of firsts for Dr. Margaret Wood. Dr. Wood, one of the nation's leading experts on anesthesiology, has become the first woman appointed to chair a P&S clinical department. Named chairman of the Department of Anesthesiology effective Dec. 18, 1995, Dr. Wood welcomes her appointment. "I am highly enthusiastic about building one of the foremost anesthesiology departments in the country and know that Columbia offers me the opportunity to do just that," she says. In addition, Dr. Wood will become the first woman president of the Association of University Anesthetists, of which she is an active member.

Dr. Margaret Wood

Dr. Wood has conducted extensive research in anesthetic cardiovascular pharmacology, drug metabolism, anesthetic hepatoxicity, vascular biology, pharmacokinetics, and drug interactions. Her interests relate to pediatric and cardiovascular anesthesia.

With more than 140 articles and book chapters published, Dr. Wood has lectured extensively on anesthesia and drug disposition and aging and anesthesia. Along with her husband, Dr. Alastair J.J. Wood, she has coauthored three editions of the standard anest hesia textbook, "Drugs and Anaesthesia: Pharmacology for Anesthesiologists." She also serves on the boards of several medical journals, including the journal Anesthesiology.

Dr. Wood, a native of Leeds, England, came to the United States in the 1970s for fellowship training at Vanderbilt University. A graduate of the University of St. Andrews and Dundee University Medical School in Scotland, she has been a member of the Vand erbilt faculty since 1976 and section chief of cardiac anesthesiology there since 1994. She chairs the American Society of Anesthesiologists' Committee on Drug Disposition and Anaesthetic Action and serves on the Anesthetic and Life Support Drugs Advisory Committee for the FDA.

Interestingly, the first P&S discipline to have a woman as full professor was also anesthesiology, where Virginia Apgar became Columbia's first anesthesiology professor when anesthesiology was a division within the surgery department.

The first woman to hold a departmental chair at P&S was Dr. Lucille Shapiro, who served as chairwoman of the Department of Microbiology from 1986 to 1989.