Karen Hitchcock

Karen R. Hitchcock (February 10, 1943 – July 10, 2019) was an American biologist and university administrator who had leadership positions at an American and a Canadian university. She served as the President of SUNY's University at Albany in Albany, New York, from 1996 until her resignation in 2003. She was Principal and Vice-Chancellor of Queen's University, in Kingston, Ontario from 2004 until an abrupt resignation in 2008, when she announced her departure in a sudden email to students. After her sudden departure from Queen's University, she returned, with husband Murray Blair, to the Albany, New York, area to live in Vischer Ferry. Education and early career Hitchcock was born in 1943 in Williston Park, New York, a suburb of New York City on Long Island, the daughter of Roy Clinton Hitchcock and Ruth Wardell Hitchcock. She attended Mineola High School and went to prom with Robert A. Bauman, Ed.D. Hitchcock received a B.S. degree in Biology from St. Lawrence University in 1964, and a Ph.D. degree in Anatomy from the University of Rochester in 1969. As a Postdoctoral Fellow, she did work in pulmonary cell biology at The Webb-Waring Institute for Medical Research at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center. Hitchcock continued her career at Boston's Tufts University, serving as the George A. Bates Professor of Histology and Chair of the Department of Anatomy and Cellular Biology in the Schools of Medicine, Dental Medicine, Veterinary Medicine and the Sackler School of Graduate Biomedical Sciences over a course of 15 years. At Tufts, Hitchcock met and, after his divorce, married Murray Blair, her dean at the School of Medicine. From there she moved to the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center and then to the University of Illinois at Chicago.