Chief Executive Officer,
Riley Hospital for Children
Ora Hirsch Pescovitz, MD, was named president and chief executive officer of Riley Hospital for Children in August 2004. She continues to serve as the executive associate dean for Research Affairs at the Indiana University School of Medicine.
As an executive associate dean, she has administered the IU School of Medicine's research program, which brings in more than $200 million per year in grants and contracts. She also oversees the Indiana Genomics Initiative, funded by $155 million in grants from the Lilly Endowment, which helped lay the research foundation for BioCrossroads and Indiana's life sciences economic initiatives.
Dr. Pescovitz is the Edwin Letzter Professor of Pediatrics and professor of cellular and integrative physiology at the IU School of Medicine. She has served as the director of Pediatric Endocrinology and Diabetology at IU School of Medicine and Riley Hospital since 1990. As a researcher she has published nearly 170 scientific papers on work primarily related to human growth and pubertal development.
She has served as president of the Society for Pediatric Research, the nation's largest pediatric research organization, and is currently president of the Lawson Wilkins Pediatric Endocrine Society, the major North American organization for pediatric endocrinologists and diabetologists.
As a physician, Dr. Pescovitz continues to see young patients in her specialty of endocrinology, the hormone-producing system that controls growth and development, reproduction and other bodily systems.
Dr. Pescovitz also continues to oversee the IU School of Medicine's efforts to dramatically expand its research programs. The school has developed plans to double the amount of research funds it receives from the National Institutes of Health--the nation's primary source of biomedical research grants--by 2012.
Dr. Pescovitz also is chair of the March of Dimes Grants Review Committee, a member of the Ad-Hoc Group for Medical Research Funding and chair of the Nominating Committee of the Hormone Foundation. Her awards include a Research Career Development Award from the National Institutes of Health, Indiana University School of Medicine's highest teaching award and the 2004 Distinguished Alumni Award from Northwestern's Feinberg School of Medicine.
She is married to Mark Pescovitz, MD, an organ transplant surgeon and vice chair of research for the Indiana University Department of Surgery. They have three children.
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