Edward B. Clark

Edward Bowersox Clark, MD died at home on March 8, 2022 surrounded by his loved ones. He was 77. Ed was born in 1944, as he liked to tell it, on a small island off the coast of New Jersey: Manhattan. His first home was in Jackson Heights, but he spent every summer on his maternal grandparents’ farm in Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania. They would put the city boy in charge of gathering eggs, and he loved fishing in the local

waters with his father, Edward P. Clark. He graduated high school in Clarks Summit and went on to attend Union College in Schenectady, New York where he received a BS with honors in Biology in 1966. His 1970 MD is from Albany Medical School; he graduated magna cum laude. In 1968, he married Carleen, a BSN who, as he often said, taught him the importance of compassionate bedside nursing. He trained in internal medicine at Mary Hitchcock Memorial Hospital, Dartmouth Medical School, and in pediatrics and pediatric cardiology at the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions. At Hopkins he was mentored by the pediatric cardiologist Dr. Catherine Neill, who became a life-long family friend.

Ed served the University of Utah for 26 years, first as Chairman of Pediatrics and the Chief Medical Officer of Primary Children’s Medical Center. He held the Wilma T. Gibson Presidential chair from 1998 to 2018. He stepped down from active service in 2021, then President of the University of Utah Medical Group and Associate Vice President of Clinical Affairs for the Health Sciences. He began a sabbatical year as a fellow of the Gardner Policy Institute. He held previous clinical and faculty positions at the Universities of Iowa and Nebraska, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Rochester. He served at the rank of Lieutenant Commander in the U.S. Public Health Service from 1971 to 1973.

Ed’s formidable brain drove a career that spanned clinical work, scientific research, and healthcare administration. He studied the basic building blocks of how the embryonic heart develops and rethought large-scale systems for delivering the best healthcare to the largest possible populations efficiently and equitably. The Clark’s Classification of Congenital Heart Disease remains a standard clinical diagnostic tool. He was a Principal Investigator on the National Children’s Study, which sought to collect data to improve health for all children. He strove to share his broad experience with current learners. He taught the history of the American healthcare system in the medical school, and his most recent work has addressed the changing landscape of its future.

Throughout his career, Ed put “the child first and always” and remained engaged in clinical care. In the 1990s, when new surgical techniques made it possible for children born with congenital heart defects to live into adulthood and adult cardiologists were not trained to care for them, he learned to treat them. He established the first program in the Intermountain West to deliver medical care to transgender children.

Ed was a mentor and a teacher, dedicated to providing equal opportunities in healthcare and education. Under his stewardship, external grants received by faculty in the Department of Pediatrics grew exponentially. He took great pride in teaching the first-year medical students, encouraging them to gain humanistic skills alongside technical ones. He planted and watered many seeds of ideas, but rarely took credit for the changes he wrought. He mentored anyone who came to his door looking for guidance, be they undergraduates, medical students, PhD students, visiting fellows, young physicians, the children of friends, or the friends of his children.

Ed loved nature. He was never happier than when on the water in a sailboat or walking alongside a nice dog. His family spent many happy times around the lakes of the Adirondacks and on the coast of Maine. Ed played a mean game of cribbage and never turned down a Manhattan. He loved a good meal with Carleen on the back porch on a warm summer evening.

He is loved and cherished by his wife Carleen Clark, son Edward P. Clark and daughter-in-law Meredith Roberts Clark, daughter Catherine E. Clark, her husband Brian Jacobson, and their child Wilfrid Errol Jacobson, sister-in-law Christina Silander Clark and nibling Arthur-Katrina Clark, who all also love and miss Ed’s brother John Clark. Friends and colleagues around the world will cherish his memory and work to honor his legacy.

Funeral arrangements have been entrusted to Starks Funeral Parlor, 3651 South 900 East, Salt Lake City, UT 84106. Please share your memories and photos with the family at www. starksfuneral.com

A family service and burial will be held at a later date in Pennsylvania. In lieu of flowers, his family request donations be made to the Edward B. Clark Endowed Lectureship in Health System Science  at https://medicine.utah.edu/pediatrics/giving/ endowed.php or directly in the link provided on this webpage.