printable versionRetiring president of Johns Hopkins to join Board of Trustees
William R. Brody
The Stanford Board of Trustees recently elected alumnus William R. Brody, outgoing president of Johns Hopkins University, to a five-year term beginning June 10, 2009.
Brody, 64, will retire as president of Johns Hopkins at the end of December after having served 12 years in the post. In March, he will become the president of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, which is located in La Jolla, Calif.
Including Brody, the board will have 33 members, two below its limit of 35.
Leslie Hume, chair of the board, praised Brody's experience and expertise.
"Bill Brody brings a wealth of knowledge and expertise to the board—a deep Stanford background, experience in having led a distinguished research university, a broad understanding of science and medicine, and a global perspective that is critical to research universities," Hume said. "We could not be more fortunate to have Dr. Brody join our board."
A native of Stockton, Calif., Brody earned a bachelor's degree in 1965 and a master's degree in 1966—both in electrical engineering—from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
He returned to California to attend Stanford's School of Medicine, where he earned a medical degree in 1970. He earned a PhD in electrical engineering at Stanford in 1972.
Brody served as a resident in the Department of Cardiovascular Surgery at Stanford from 1972 to 1973; worked as a clinical associate in the surgery branch of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute in Bethesda, Md., from 1973 to 1975; and served as a resident in the Radiology Department at the University of California-San Francisco from 1975 to 1977.
He was a professor of radiology and, by courtesy, of electrical engineering at Stanford from 1977 to 1986.
He co-founded three medical-device companies and from 1984 to 1987 was the president and chief executive officer of Resonex Inc., which manufactured magnetic resonance imaging equipment.
In 1987, Brody became the radiologist-in-chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital. From 1987 to 1994, he served as the Martin Donner Professor and director of the Radiology Department at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. During that time, he was also a professor of biomedical engineering and a professor of electrical and computer engineering.
He spent the next two years as the provost of the Academic Health Center at the University of Minnesota, where he also was a professor of radiology.
Brody returned to Johns Hopkins University as president in 1996.
He currently serves on the board of IBM Corp. and as a trustee of the Commonwealth Fund, a private foundation dedicated to improving health care. He is a member of the executive committee of the Council on Competitiveness, a nonpartisan, nongovernmental organization that brings together business, labor, academic and government leaders to evaluate economic challenges and opportunities.