Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, MD, PhD, was tapped as the next editor-in-chief of JAMA and the JAMA Network, becoming the first person of color and second woman to lead the journal, the American Medical Association (AMA) announced today.
Bibbins-Domingo is a professor and chair of the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, and the first vice dean for population health and health equity, at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) School of Medicine. She also co-founded the UCSF Center for Vulnerable Populations at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center.
During an online press conference, Bibbins-Domingo pledged to restore the journal as a “trusted voice” in medicine, calling the position “a dream job.”
From health disparities to climate change, a number of global forces “shape how we think about health,” she noted. “It’s the responsibility of a journal like JAMA and the JAMA Network to be able to put science in context of these broader forces … I think there’s never been [a] more important time for JAMA to be that trusted voice.”
The AMA is “tremendously pleased and fortunate to welcome Dr. Bibbins-Domingo as the new editor-in-chief … As a physician, scholar, and leader, she has focused on health equity, on cardiovascular disease prevention — top priorities for the AMA — and more recently on COVID-19,” said James L. Madara, MD, CEO and executive vice president of the AMA, in a press release.
“I am confident Dr. Bibbins-Domingo — with her remarkable professional background ranging from basic science to an array of scholarly approaches to clinical studies — will effectively advance JAMA‘s mission that accelerates clinical research into practice at this critical time in health care in the U.S. and in global public health,” he added.
The announcement of Bibbins-Domingo’s new position concludes a “thorough, thoughtful, and deliberate” search involving an 18-member committee of experts in academia and medicine, said Rodrigo Sierra, chief communications officer of the AMA, during the press conference.
JAMA‘s last editor-in-chief, Howard Bauchner, MD, resigned from his post in June 2021, following the release of a broadly criticized podcast on structural racism in medicine earlier that year. An independent investigation into the development and review of the podcast was conducted, during which time Bauchner was placed on administrative leave. The podcast has since been deleted.
Asked whether a lack of diversity in medicine and science was to blame for the airing of the controversial podcast, Bibbins-Domingo noted that “the entire scientific and medical enterprise has been plagued by the inability to acknowledge these important forces that shape the health of our patients. And we know that some of this blindness to seeing these forces has to do with who’s in the room making the decisions, who’s in the room conducting scientific studies, who’s in the room shaping policy, [and] who’s in the room deciding what gets published.”
While scientific journals aren’t the only entities affected by this “blindness,” she added, they are “an essential part of the way scientific enterprise gets conducted. And I think that doing the hard reflection on how we do what is best for science and the health of our patients is the important journey that we’re all on right now.”
Discussing her vision for the journal, Bibbins-Domingo noted that researchers today are living in “a golden age” of science and medicine, yet the public’s growing mistrust of these institutions — as demonstrated during the pandemic — threatens progress, as do health disparities.
“It’s a time when the great advances in science do not always translate into improvements in health for our patients, or improvements in health of the society at large. And, in fact, deep inequities in health observed across communities are actually widening,” she said.
Against this backdrop of mistrust, JAMA has an opportunity to “not only help readers make sense of our changing world, but to communicate science and scientific discovery in a way that actually advances clinical practice, advances the health of all of our patients, and improves the health of the population nationally and globally,” she continued.
Bibbins-Domingo graduated from Princeton University in 1987 with a degree in molecular biology. She then earned her PhD in biochemistry and her MD, as well as a Masters degree in clinical research, from UCSF.
She started her career as a biochemist, training under Harold Varmus, MD, the Nobel Prize-winning scientist and former director of the NIH. She participated in the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force from 2010 to 2017, and is a member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation, the Association of American Physicians, and the National Academy of Medicine.
Source: MedicalNewsToday.com
