Distinguished Speaker Series

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Dr. Holly Atkinson Bio

Dr. Holly Atkinson, a well-known media personality and a gifted speaker, has engaged audiences on achieving wellness for more than 20 years. She is the senior on-air medical correspondent and chief medical editor of HealthiNation, the leading digital consumer health video network. Atkinson is also assistant professor of Medicine and co-director of the Advancing Idealism in Medicine Program at Mt. Sinai School of Medicine and adjunct professor of Public Health at Weill Medical College of Cornell University. With degrees in both medicine and journalism, she possesses a unique blend of experience and skill—medical expertise, media savvy and business acumen. Atkinson has worked in print, broadcast television and web-based technologies for both consumers and medical professionals and has extensive international business experience.

Atkinson has a broad range of experience as a medical correspondent, including assignments with NBC’s TODAY, The CBS Morning News, Lifetime Medical Television and the PBS health show BodyWatch, having jump started her career in TV as a researcher for Walter Cronkite’s Universe Show on CBS. For more than 10 years, Atkinson worked as senior vice president for Lifetime Medical Television. Then, as an entrepreneur, she helped to found and ultimately became president and CEO of Reuters Health Information, Inc., a leading international health news agency. She has recently been a frequent guest on ABC News Now.

Atkinson is an accomplished author, having written the best-selling book Women and Fatigue. She wrote a regular health column for New Woman magazine and feature pieces for The South Beach Diet Newsletter. Atkinson has been a resident physician on Dr.Weil.com andiVillageHealth.com, both leading web sites.

Atkinson was a member of the original team that launched Journal Watch, a monthly summary of important medical research findings developed for practicing physicians by Massachusetts Medical Society (MMS), publisher of The New England Journal of Medicine. After writing for Journal Watch for seven years, the MMS asked her to help launch a consumer health newsletter, HealthNews. She became the founding editor-in-chief and remained at the helm of the
newsletter for 12 years. Upon leaving HealthNews, she was founding medical editor-in-chief of Everydayhealth.com, one of the leading health websites, and a regular columnist for the site.

Atkinson devotes considerable time to a number of not-for-profit organizations and charities. She is past president of Physicians for Human Rights, an organization that shared in the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997 for its effort to eradicate landmines. In 1995, Atkinson conducted a medical mission to Bosnia where she documented the health effects of landmines on civilians. She has also served on the boards of Legal Momentum, the nation's oldest and largest women’s
civil rights organization; the American Heart Association and the Society for Women’s Health Research.

She has received the National Council of Women’s Young Achievers Award; the Society for Women’s Health Research’s Communications Achievement Award in Women’s Health, presented by then first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton; the Physicians for Human Rights’ Health and Human Rights Award and the Unitarian Universalist’s UN Award for Human Rights.

Atkinson has a MD from the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry and a MS degree in Journalism from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Colgate University with a BS in Biology. She is a fellow of the American College of Physicians and a member of the American Medical Women’s Association.