Nadia Hansel, a child of immigrants and one of the first in her family to go to college, in September became the first female director of the Department of Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

Hansel grew up in Silver Spring, Maryland. Her mother, from Haiti, worked as an administrative assistant at the World Bank (where Hansel interned one high school summer and realized finance was not for her); her father, a German immigrant, repaired televisions.

Her parents valued education, and Hansel excelled in her Montgomery County public-school classes. She attended Harvard College, graduating magna cum laude with a biology degree in 1993, and went on to Harvard Medical School.

“I very early became interested in medicine and public health with a goal of improving the health and lives of others,” she says.

“As a doctor, you are trying to find all of the best pathways to treat your patient. Combining that with science for me is the ultimate career because I can do my best with the treatments at hand, and then ask questions and design studies that push the boundaries of our current therapies and our current knowledge.”

“That really gets me excited to wake up every morning. I literally love my job.”

After her internal medicine residency at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, Hansel came to Johns Hopkins for a fellowship in pulmonary and critical care. She never left.

“I fell in love with the Hopkins community,” she says.

“I wanted to come closer to home, but that’s not what kept me here. What kept me here was the fact that it is a special place. It has a strong history of medicine and a strong culture where the patient is always at the center of what we do. In clinical care, in innovation, and in training, we’re surrounded here by really brilliant people.” 

Hansel, a pulmonary and critical care physician who studies health disparities and environmental exposures in lung disease, has been on the faculty since 2004, and in 2014 became associate dean of research at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center and chair of the Bayview Scientific Advisory Board.

She was also the first female director of the Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine, a role she occupied from 2019 until 2022, when she became interim director of the Department of Medicine.

When she took the permanent director job in September, Hansel also became physician-in-chief of The Johns Hopkins Hospital and the William Osler Professor of Medicine.

During her fellowship in 2001, Hansel earned a master’s degree from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

“I didn’t think I was going to do any research,” she says, “but I caught the bug. What drew me to the research side of things was my training here at Hopkins, being surrounded by people who were excited about pushing that curiosity boundary, recognizing that medicine is an art and a science, and there is so much that we don’t know.”

In more than 300 peer-reviewed publications and in work funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Environmental Protection Agency, Hansel’s research helps explain why some people are more susceptible than others to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and other respiratory ailments.

“Why has this patient smoked for 80 years and doesn’t have COPD and this one smoked for five years and has very severe COPD?” she asks. “It’s not fully explained by genetics, so there have to be other causes. A lot of it, I believe, comes down to other exposures, which have been linked to a lack of resources, like living in low-income housing close to major roads, where the air quality is worse, or having a scarcity of nutritious food.”

In her new role, Hansel sometimes works 12- to 14-hour days as she leads a department with more than 650 full-time faculty members across 18 academic divisions.

“My priority is to support the amazing faculty in the Department of Medicine,” she says. “They are driven by a strong mission to do what’s best for the patient, push our boundaries of innovation and train future leaders in medicine.” Part of that, she says, is investing in technologies and resources to “make sure we stay on the cutting edge of medicine.”

Yet, she still finds time to see patients a half-day a week, and to continue her research.

“There are studies that I have started that I still feel very passionate about,” she says. “We currently have two intervention studies running, one about improving air quality and the other about improving diet. I’m very motivated to find evidence to support interventions to improve lung health.”

As the first woman director in the Department of Medicine’s 132-year history, Hansel knows others are looking to her as a role model. Her advice: “Always respect the balance that works for you.”

Throughout her career, she says, she has made decisions that put family over career, and she has never regretted them. “It’s important for other women to realize that you can have a family and be successful in academic medicine,” she says. “You can be a fabulous and devoted mother and also be great at work.”

Hansel and her husband have three children, two in college and one in high school. All three want to pursue careers in medicine, she says.

“I think it’s because I come home and I say, “Who wouldn’t want a job where you can support yourself and hopefully impact other people in a positive way?’ I can’t imagine a better career. It doesn’t mean I love every single day, but I love my job and I can’t imagine doing something else.”