A nationally recognized leader in academic medicine, Mary E. Klotman, MD, is executive vice president for health affairs at Duke University, dean of the Duke University School of Medicine, and chief academic officer for Duke Health.

Klotman was appointed as Duke’s first executive vice president for health affairs in June 2023 and assumed her new role on July 1, 2023. She was named dean of the School of Medicine in January 2017 and was appointed to a second five-year term in 2022. Prior to her appointment as dean, Klotman served with distinction as chair of the Department of Medicine in the Duke University School of Medicine for seven years.

Klotman earned her undergraduate and medical degrees from Duke University. She completed her internal medicine residency and a fellowship in Infectious Diseases in the Department of Medicine at Duke before joining the faculty as assistant professor of medicine. She joined the National Institutes of Health in 1991, where she was a member of the Public Health Service and trained and worked in the Laboratory of Tumor Cell Biology under the direction of Robert C. Gallo, MD.

Before returning to Duke in 2010, Klotman joined Mount Sinai School of Medicine where she was the Irene and Dr. Arthur M. Fishberg Professor of Medicine and served as chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases for 13 years. She was also co-director of Mount Sinai’s Global Health and Emerging Pathogens Institute, a program designed to translate basic science discoveries into clinical therapeutics for newly emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases. 

A pioneering physician-scientist, Klotman’s research interests are focused on the molecular pathogenesis of Human Immunodeficiency Virus 1 (HIV-1) infection. Among many important contributions to this field, Klotman and her team demonstrated that HIV resides in and evolves separately in kidney cells, a critical step in HIV-associated kidney disease. Most recently, her group has been defining the role of integrase-defective lentiviral vectors for the delivery of an HIV vaccine.

Klotman is a councilor of the Association of American Physicians and past president of the Association of Professors of Medicine. She was elected to membership in the Academy of Medicine in 2014. Klotman is a former president of the Duke Medical Alumni Association and received a Duke University School of Medicine Distinguished Alumni Award in 2015.