National sports medicine leader to give 2025 Bray Lecture

Kimberly Harmon

National sports medicine leader to give 2025 Bray Lecture

Kimberly Harmon is a physician, professor and consultant

2025 Bray Health Leadership Lecture

4-5:15 p.m. Tuesday, April 8

Followed by a 45-minute reception in the MU Horizon Room.

R.S.V.P.

A former student-athlete and student athletic trainer at the University of Notre Dame, Kimberly G. Harmon, MD has built a career caring for college athletes’ health and serving and advising organizations such as the NCAA, Pac-12, American Medical Society for Sports Medicine, Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, National Basketball Players Association, National Football League and National Hockey League.

She is a professor in the departments of Family Medicine and Orthopaedics and Sports Medicine at the University of Washington, where she is the sports medicine section head. Since joining the university in 1998, she has been a team physician caring for multiple teams over the years including football, women’s basketball, women’s volleyball, men’s and women’s track and field and cross country, softball, baseball, and men’s and women’s swimming.  She was the second female Power 5 football physician and has been the football team physician for the last 26 years.

Kimberly was president of the American Medical Society for Sports Medicine from 2009-2010, and sat on the AMSSM Foundation Board from 2011-2022, serving as president from 2019-2020. She has been involved with the Pac-12 Student Athlete Health and Well-Being Board Initiative as a board representative from 2015-2020 and as chair from 2017-2019. From 2020-2023, she served as research development director for the Pac-12, which awarded $18 million in funding for research projects benefiting the health and wellness of student-athletes and helping to guide the Pac-12 through the COVID-19 pandemic.

Kimberly has a long history of service with the NCAA, serving on the NCAA Competitive Safeguards Committee from 2003-2007. She has severed on multiple task forces and is on the NCAA Concussion Advisory Group. As a researcher, Kimberly is interested in issues of importance to college athletes, and she has contributed important work in the areas of prevention of sudden cardiac death, concussion, sickle cell trait, tendinopathy and orthobiologics. She developed the University of Washington NCAA Athlete Death Database, the most comprehensive database of its kind, which has resulted in paradigm changing findings, such as learning that the rate of sudden cardiac death was much higher than previously known and that certain sub-groups of athletes (men, black athletes, basketball athletes) were at significantly higher risk.  This database has been used to explore deaths due to sickle cell trait, homicide and suicide and led to health policy changes.

In addition to her work with the NCAA, Kimberly has served as medical advisor to the National Basketball Players Association, is a member of the NFL Head, Neck and Spine Committee and is Deputy Chief Medical Officer for the National Hockey League and a member of the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics. She sits on the medical advisory boards for several parent advocacy groups, including the Nick of Time Foundation, Parent Heart Watch, and Who We Play For.
 
She attended Indiana University School of Medicine, completed her family medicine residency at Memorial Hospital in South Bend, Ind., and participated in a sports medicine fellowship at Ball Memorial Hospital in Muncie, Ind.

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