Kevin B. Churchwell

Kevin B. Churchwell trained to care for critically ill children before moving into hospital leadership. After graduating from MIT in 1983, he attended Vanderbilt's medical school and completed pediatric residency and critical-care fellowship training at Boston Children's Hospital.

His leadership roles took him to children's hospitals at Vanderbilt and Nemours before he returned to Boston Children's in 2013 as chief operating officer and executive vice president of health affairs. Children's hospitals concentrate the sickest young patients in one place: infants born too early, children with cancer and congenital heart disease, and injuries that community hospitals cannot treat alone. Running one means running a teaching institution, a research enterprise and an intensive-care operation at the same time.

At Boston Children's, he helped lead work to make hospital systems more reliable and improve safety for patients and staff. Those efforts involved teams across the hospital, from intensive-care units to pharmacy and nursing. He chairs the board of the Solutions for Patient Safety network, a collaboration of children's hospitals working to prevent harm, an effort that treats safety as a shared problem across institutions.

He became president and chief executive officer of Boston Children's Hospital in March 2021. The Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce's 2026 biography identifies him as the hospital's chief executive and describes a role spanning patient care, research and medical education. The chamber named him one of its 2026 Distinguished Bostonians.

He continues to serve as the hospital's president and CEO and as chair of the safety network's board, positions that join the bedside specialty he trained in with the systems that keep children out of avoidable danger.

He is a Nashville native, and his rise through children's hospital leadership began at Vanderbilt, where he spent fifteen years as a critical-care physician and later chief of staff of the children's hospital. He went on to serve as chief executive of Nemours/Alfred I. duPont Hospital for Children in Wilmington, Delaware, before returning to Boston in 2013. Vanderbilt recognized him and his wife with its Trumpet Award honor during those years.

He also holds a professorship at Harvard Medical School and serves on the board of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge.