As the new dean of a top US medical school, Nancy Andrews holds a position only a handful of women have achieved. While getting her first degree in molecular biophysics and biochemistry at Yale University, Andrews knew she wanted a research career, but she didn't contemplate medical school until she saw the opportunity to work at the interface of medicine and science. She completed her PhD in biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge and her MD at Harvard. She chose paediatrics for her residency training in part because she enjoyed genetics, the basis of many childhood diseases. See CV

Her path shifted towards administration once she became a faculty member at Harvard Medical School, as she hoped to help improve the Harvard-MIT MD-PhD programme. “It wasn't optimal for students,” she says. The programme needed better integration between departments to speed up the time to graduation. Her former mentor at MIT, David Nathan, says that as soon as Andrews took over, the programme flourished — in part because she got to know each student individually. “She got in the trenches with the troops,” he says.

Appointed dean for basic sciences and graduate studies at Harvard, Andrews relished problem-solving and helping to develop young careers. All the while, she has overseen a productive lab, working on the regulation of iron homeostasis and its relevance to disorders such as anaemia and haemochromatosis.

Over the past few years, she has been approached to take on a number of senior administration jobs, but none suited her until the offer came from Duke. “I was impressed by the culture and how easily innovation comes there,” she says. What she didn't anticipate was the hoopla made of her appointment. “I was surprised, but ultimately glad the fuss was made to remind people that gender equality is still a problem,” she says.

Nathan likens Andrews' personal style to that of Eugene Stead, an innovative former chief of medicine who made Duke's medical school a top programme in the 1960s, in part by tending to the needs of younger faculty members. Although Andrews will undoubtedly face the problems of every major medical school — recruitment and retention of top faculty members, attracting the best students and devising novel ways to teach — Nathan expects she will maintain the standard of excellence that was fostered by Stead.