A LIFE’ LIFE’S WORK
Dr Barbara Murphy, MD, MB, BAO, BCh, FRCPI (1964-2021)
Alumna Dr Barbara T Murphy (Class of 1989) was the Murray M Rosenberg Professor of Medicine, Chair of the Department of Medicine and Dean for Clinical Integration and Population Health at Mount Sinai in New York, and a world leader in treating and researching kidney disease and transplant immunology
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r Barbara Murphy, world-renowned transplant nephrologist, scientist and trailblazer, passed away on June 30, 2021, at the age of 56. Barbara’s professional achievements in her too-short life were remarkable. Outside of work, she shared a rich life with her husband, New Yorker Peter Fogarty, and was a devoted mother to her young son, Gavin. Her charm, wit, sense of fun and direct approach disarmed everyone she met. Her extraordinary career and vital work had a deep and lasting impact on patients, colleagues, friends and mentees throughout the Mount Sinai Health System, the wider medical community in the US and globally in the nephrology community.
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Barbara was inspired to pursue a career when as an undergraduate at RCSI, she met a young patient, just a few years younger than she was at the time, who was suffering from kidney failure. As she explained in an interview in 2016 with Irish America magazine: “I saw her on dialysis when I was a medical student, then I saw her when she got her kidney transplant, and then I saw her as a renal registrar – I saw her all the way through.” The young woman went on to become a teacher. Witnessing the life-changing impact of that transplant, Barbara set her course: a fellowship in clinical nephrology at Beaumont Hospital in Dublin, then postdoctoral training with a fellowship in nephrology at Harvard Medical School’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Years earlier, Barbara had set her heart on Harvard when, on a J-1 summer visa to Boston, she took the wrong bus and wound up taking a detour through
