Georgetown announced the hiring of Howard Federoff as head of the university’s financially troubled Medical Center this week, culminating a months-long search for a fifth head of the edical Center since 2002.

Federoff, who has worked as an administrator and professor at the University of Rochester’s School of Medicine for the past 11 years, will assume his new position as executive vice president for health sciences on April 1, 2007.

Federoff said that he is looking forward to directing the edical Center, which has accumulated over $340 million in debt since 1995, including more than $30 million in the past two years. He said that the Medical Center has had strong leadership in recent years, citing the sale of Georgetown University Hospital to MedStar Health in 2000.

Federoff said that he views his new job as an opportunity to push the Medical Center into the upper echelon of American medical science. He will succeed Stuart Bondurant, who has served as interim executive vice president for health sciences since the abrupt resignation of Daniel Sedmak in August 2004.

“The Medical Center has now been righted,” Federoff said. “I think it’s really poised to take off.”

Federoff said that he has amassed significant experience dealing with finances over the past 10 years, but that there will still be a learning curve before he is ready to manage the Medical Center’s budget. He said that he plans to transition into the job over the next four months, working several hours per week and accumulating necessary information while retaining his current job at Rochester.

“There will be a very steep, ascending curve of learning that I’ll have to do,” he said.

Medical Center spokeswoman Laura Cavender said that Federoff will be working closely with Bondurant over the next few months.

“Dr. Federoff will be a frequent presence on campus over the course of the coming months, immersing himself in the transition to ensure that he is well acquainted with the Medical Center community and Medical Center operations and in a position to offer the

most effective leadership possible when his term formally begins,” Cavender said.

Federoff’s appointment marks the end of a search process that began in the spring to find a permanent head for the Medical Center.

A search committee led by Fr. Howard Gray, S.J., a member of the university’s Board of Directors, recommended four candidates for the position to University President John J. DeGioia several weeks ago. DeGioia chose to hire Federoff after reviewing each of the four finalists.

Gray declined to comment on Federoff or any of the other candidates, but said that the search committee was extremely pleased with the overall quality of applicant pool. He said that in light of the Medical Center’s recent budget woes, the committee paid particular attention to candidates’ financial experience.

Federoff said that he is not worried by the recent turnover in the Medical Center’s leadership, adding that the Medical Center has improved steadily in recent years.

“I’m not haunted by the past,” he said.

While the new job will not entail any entirely new responsibilities, Federoff said, it will require him to perform more responsibilities simultaneously than he has ever been asked to in the past. Because of this, Federoff said that he will transition his research grants to colleagues and will take on only an advisory role in the research portfolio that he has developed over the past two decades.

Though he will not have a laboratory at Georgetown when he arrives in April, Federoff said that he may decide to take on research again in the future if it will not conflict with any of his duties.

“I’m a real-time person,” he said.

Federoff received a B.A. from Earlham College in 1974 and earned both his Ph.D. and M.D. from the Albert Einstein College of edicine at Yeshiva University.