Chancellor's Biography

Chancellor Robert A. Barish, MD, MBA, assumed leadership of the LSU Health Sciences Center at Shreveport in April 2009 following a distinguished 24-year career in academic medicine at the University of Maryland Medical Center. It was in Maryland where he founded a nationally recognized emergency medicine program before rising to Vice Dean of Clinical Affairs at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.

After earning his medical degree from New York Medical College in 1979, Dr. Barish interrupted his residency training for one year to help care for malaria victims and starving children in refugee camps in Cambodia and Somalia. Returning to the United States, he completed his internal medicine residency training and subsequently completed a second residency in emergency medicine. He became one of the youngest chiefs of emergency services at a university hospital in the nation.

Dr. Barish received his MBA from Loyola College and BA from the University of New Hampshire. He is a member of Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Medical Society, a Fellow of the American College of Emergency Physicians, a Fellow of the American Academy of Emergency Medicine, and is a Distinguished Eagle Scout and the recipient of numerous teaching awards. Following the 2005 devastation of Hurricane Katrina to the Gulf Coast, he helped lead a medical regiment dispatched by the State of Maryland that delivered emergency care to more than 6,000 hurricane victims in Jefferson Parish. A former lieutenant colonel and flight surgeon in the Maryland Air National Guard, Dr. Barish in 1992 was among a select group invited to become a NASA astronaut candidate at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Dr. Barish and his wife, Jenny, reside in Shreveport and have three daughters, Danielle, Liza and Sophia.