Barbara Atkinson to Retire as Executive Dean of the Medical School at the University of Kansas

Barbara Atkinson, executive vice president of the University of Kansas Medical Center and executive dean of the university’s School of Medicine, has announced that she will retire at the end of the academic year.

Dr. Atkinson came to the University of Kansas in 1999 as chair of the department of pathology. She was appointed executive dean of the medical school in 2002.

Dean Atkinson began her career at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, where she was assistant and then associate professor and director of the hospital’s cytopathology laboratory from 1978 to 1987. She served as professor and chair of the department of pathology and laboratory medicine at the Medical College of Pennsylvania from 1987 to 1994 and at the Medical College of Pennsylvania and Hahnemann University from 1994 to 1996. From 1996 to 1999, she was the Annenberg Dean of the MCP Hahnemann School of Medicine, now Drexel College of Medicine.

Dr. Atkinson received her bachelor’s degree from the College of Wooster in Wooster, Ohio, and earned her medical degree from Jefferson Medical College of Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia.