Kenneth L. Davis, MD, is the former President and Chief Executive Officer of the Mount Sinai Health System in New York City. For more than 16 years, Dr. Davis has led the efforts that have transformed the Mount Sinai Health System – previously The Mount Sinai Medical Center – into one of the nation’s largest integrated health systems, with $8 billion in revenue, 42,000 employees, eight hospitals, and an extensive ambulatory platform. During his tenure, he helped launch what has been characterized as one of the largest financial turnarounds in academic medicine. This placed the institution on a trajectory of dramatic growth of both scope and ambition, entering a new era of innovation in collaborative research, education, and clinical care.
As a neurobiologist and Chair of Mount Sinai’s Department of Psychiatry, Dr. Davis conducted pioneering research that led the FDA to approve four of the first five drugs for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease and to a revolutionary understanding of white matter, oligodendrocytes, and myelin in the pathophysiology of schizophrenia, opening an entirely new approach to this devastating disease.
In 2002, he was elected to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences. The author or co-author of more than 575 scientific articles, Dr. Davis has been recognized as one of the most highly cited researchers in the field of brain diseases. He has won awards from several organizations, most notably the Alzheimer’s Association, the Society of Biological Psychiatry, and the American Psychiatric Association. He was also awarded the George H. W. Bush Lifetime of Leadership Award from Yale University. In 2014 he was named a trustee of the Aspen Institute.