Carola B. Eisenberg

Carola B. Eisenberg

Carola Blitzman Eisenberg, MD, now retired but actively involved in human rights work through Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI), and elsewhere, is the former Dean of Students of MIT (the first woman to hold that position at MIT), then Dean of Student Affairs at Harvard Medical School (HMS) (1978–1990). She has for a long time been Lecturer in the newly-renamed Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at HMS (formerly the Department of Social Medicine). She is also Honorary Psychiatrist with the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, a longstanding position there.

She is a native Argentine and is a cofounder of Physicians for Human Rights and currently its Vice President and the Chair of its Asylum Committee. Her dissertation on "A Histological Study of Tay-Sachs Disease" was presented in 1944 for her medical degree at the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina. She is also a 1935 graduate of the School of Psychiatric Social Work in Hospicio De Las Mercedes (Hospice of the Virgin of Mercy), Argentina. After receiving her medical degree from the University of Buenos Aires and taking her psychiatric training at the Hospicio De Las Mercedes, she emigrated to the U.S. and became Fellow in Child Psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, Johns Hopkins Medical School, Baltimore, Maryland.

She is licensed to practice medicine (psychiatry) in Maryland (1955) and Massachusetts (1971).

She served on the faculty of the Johns Hopkins Medical School from 1958-1967 before becoming a staff psychiatrist at the Student Health Service of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. From 1972 to 1978, she served as Dean of Students at MIT, the first woman to occupy that position and the first to serve on the Academic Council, its highest academic governing authority. In 1978, after leaving MIT, she was appointed Dean for Student Affairs at Harvard Medical School, where she served for 12 years (1978–1990). From 1990 to 1992, she was Director of the International Programs for Medical Students at HMS.

Throughout her career, she has consulted with the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) (1979), Swarthmore College (1984), Mental Health Division of the World Health Organization (1985), Committee on Human Rights and Medical Practice, American College of Physicians (1989–1993), National Institutes of Health (1992), Office of the Surgeon General, Department of Health and Human Services (1992), National Research Council of the National Academy of Science and The National Academy of Engineering (1992–1996), and the National Institutes of Health (1995–1998).

She has been a member of human rights missions to El Salvador, Chile, and Paraguay. She founded and served as Vice President of Physicians for Human Rights USA, headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and as President of the Examiners Club of Boston. She served on the Committee on Women in Science and Engineering of the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences and is currently a member of the Advisory Committee to the Office of Research on Women’s Health of the National Institutes of Health.

She is a member of Boston's Examiner Club and active in both The Cambridge-based Institute for Healthcare Improvement and the Oral History Project of the Foundation for the History of Women in Medicine, and is active in human rights issues broadly.

She is the widow of Leon Eisenberg, MD, Presley Professor of Social Medicine and Professor of Psychiatry Emeritus in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine of the Harvard Medical School of Boston. As the wife of the late Dr. Manfred Guttmacher (brother of Alan Frank Guttmacher), she is the mother of Laurence B. Guttmacher, MD, who is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Medical Humanities and also Advisory Dean, University of Rochester School of Medicine (URMC), and Alan Edward Guttmacher, MD, who succeeded Dr. Francis Sellers Collins (now National Institutes of Health Director) as Acting Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) at NIH, but since Dec. 1, 2009, has been Acting Director, then Director of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), also at NIH.