LITTLE ROCK -- Susan S. Smyth, MD, PhD, has been named executive vice chancellor and dean of the College of Medicine at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS), effective June 1.

She is succeeding Christopher Westfall, MD, who retires Aug. 1, 2021, after 24 years at UAMS.

Smyth joins UAMS from the University of Kentucky College of Medicine, where she is the chief of the Division of Cardiovascular Medicine and the director of the Gill Heart and Vascular Institute, a position in which she developed and implemented an operating structure that emphasized the integration and translation across research, education, and clinical care.

A nationally known cardiologist and translational scientist, Smyth is an elected member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation, immediate past-president of the Association of University Cardiologists, and has served on the CTSA Steering Committee for the National Center for Advancing Translational Science. At the University of Kentucky, she is Senior Associate Director of the Kentucky Center for Clinical and Translational Science and has a part-time appointment as a physician and research investigator at the Lexington VA Health Care System.

Smyth graduated from Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts, with a bachelor of arts in biology before earning both a medical degree and a doctorate of pharmacology at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. She completed an internal medicine residency, including a year as chief resident, at University Medical Center in Stony Brook, New York, and cardiology fellowships at Mount Sinai Medical School in New York, New York, and The University of North Carolina, where she joined the institution's faculty in 2001.

Smyth's husband, Andrew J. Morris, Ph.D., is internationally known for research in lipid metabolism and signaling. They have two children -- Edward, a junior at Washington University in St. Louis, and William, a high school senior.