Oregon Health & Science University has found its new president.

Shereef Elnahal, who most recently served as Under Secretary for Health at the Department of Veterans Affairs under President Joe Biden, was confirmed by the board on Friday.

Elnahal is a doctor, MBA, and former White House fellow who built a reputation for integrity and energetic leadership when he helped reverse the fortunes of a struggling safety net hospital in Newark, New Jersey and then led it through the pandemic.

“I’m wired in a weird way, such that I love entering large organizations that are having problems and fixing those problems,” Elnahal told a reporter with NJ.com in 2022.

At OHSU, Elnahal will get that wish. He’s taking the helm of a critically important institution that has been hobbled by dysfunction and is bracing for financial trouble.

Like many Oregon hospitals, OHSU is spending more on its hospital operations than it brings in, losing roughly $100 million in each of the last two fiscal years.

OHSU’s research mission faces further cuts. It could lose more than $200 million in federal funding if cuts to the National Institutes of Health, proposed by President Donald Trump, move forward.

The health care giant’s prior president, Danny Jacobs, announced last October he was resigning for personal reasons, on the same day that OHSU was sued over allegations its leaders had defamed an assistant dean to shift focus from their failures handling a harassment case. Then, Gov. Tina Kotek publicly rebuked OHSU’s board for trying to appoint an internal candidate who was favored by Jacobs to a three-year term as president just days after Jacobs said he would resign.

Elnahal was ultimately chosen to lead after an extensive public hiring process.

Elnahal’s first day is August 11. At his first press conference Friday, he pledged to lead with transparency, to tackle long wait times for appointments at OHSU, and to look for ways to make the institution profitable without divesting from care for the poor. He also pledged to hold monthly press conferences during his tenure.

Elnahal said he plans to spend the next several months introducing himself to as many people as possible and holding town halls. He wants a culture where people are rewarded for raising concerns.

“I welcome questions, I welcome dissent, I welcome feedback and pushback,” he said. “For a public organization especially, that is essential.”

Elnahal said OHSU, like other academic health systems across the country, needs to evolve to be more responsive to its patients’ needs.

“I know that change does not happen well unless you have that trust, unless people in your organization see your success, as a set of leaders, as their success,” he said. “The old adage of change moving at the speed of trust is a really important one to me.”

On Friday, shortly after they voted to confirm Elnahal, OHSU’s board heard the outlines of a plan for how to respond in the event of cuts to federal funding.

OHSU’s goal, according to a work group assembled by interim president Steve Stadum, should be to preserve as many staff positions as possible and to protect in particular scientists in their thirties and forties who have invested in their education and are still early in their career, who they view as the next generation of research leaders.

The work group proposed integrating OHSU’s seven separate research centers into a single research mission under a single dean at the Medical School, to consolidate administrative positions and to clarify and simplify the research budget.

If cuts are necessary, closing physical facilities and reducing the number of administrators would be the first steps. Next on the list would be researchers who don’t bring in significant outside grants and whose work has been heavily subsidized by OHSU, according to the plan presented to the board.

In his conversation with reporters, Elnahal said he will look to the workgroup for guidance when it comes to managing any cuts to OHSU’s research mission. He said he will explain the values and thinking behind any difficult choices he has to make.

“Nobody will be in the dark about what those decisions are and why they were made,” Elnahal said.

He pledged to work with Oregon’s congressional delegation and with philanthropists to prevent cuts to research wherever possible. But he said the reality is that federal budgets will not continue to grow to the same extent they did following the pandemic.

Elnahal has spent the past five months as an advisor at Thrive Capital, a venture capital and private equity firm. Other academic research institutions, he said, have been able to partner with private investors to support their innovation and to profit off their intellectual property, steps he thinks could ultimately help OHSU become profitable and subsidize patient care.

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2025/06/30/ohsu-president-shereef-elnahal-building-trust-potential-funding-cuts/