Robert Ashman, 1938-2026
The following message was sent to the Department of Internal Medicine from Chair & DEO Upinder Singh, MD, earlier today.
We learned yesterday that the founding director of our department’s first Division of Rheumatology, Robert F. Ashman, MD, passed away late last week. He had been living near some of his children and grandchildren in Mansfield, Massachusetts, where a service will be held Wednesday. Our thoughts go out to all his family. A Celebration of Life will be scheduled for later this summer in Iowa City. We will share details of this event when they are confirmed. His obituary can be found here.
Born in 1938 in Buffalo, New York, young Bob seemed destined for achievements in veterinary science, earning degrees in Zoology from Wabash College and then in Animal Physiology from Oxford University under a Rhodes Scholarship. But by 1966, he had turned his attention instead to human biology, earning his MD from Columbia University. After that it was a residency at Brigham’s in Boston, a research fellowship in arthritis and immunochemistry at the NIH, and another stint in the UK, this time as a Helen Hay Whitney Fellow at the National Institute for Medical Research in London.
By 1972, Dr. Ashman started putting down roots in Los Angeles at the University of California, first as a clinical rheumatology fellow, and then rising through the ranks to associate professor in their departments of medicine and of microbiology and immunology. The details of his recruitment to Iowa in 1980 are unknown to me, but it is not hard to imagine then-Chair Dr. Frank Abboud’s convincing pitch: a chance to build something lasting from scratch, a Division of Rheumatology.
Dr. Ashman’s impact on this department and the subspecialty is profound. Though experienced rheumatologists had been at University of Iowa Health Care in the 1970s, their formal recognition in a division and then rapid expansion were due to the efforts of Dr. Ashman. By the end of the 1980s, the division counted eight tenured and tenure-track faculty members as well as three associates and three fellows among its ranks. Dr. Ashman’s leadership throughout that decade expanded the division’s research footprint with the establishment in 1982 of a Clinical Arthritis Research Center funded by the National Arthritis Foundation.
His own research in B cell activation and antigen receptors carried him through the 1980s, earning him a membership in the American Federation for Clinical Research and the American Society for Clinical Investigation. By 2004, his decades of discovery earned him a career-achievement recognition from the American College of Rheumatology. Continuously funded throughout his research career, Dr. Ashman was working under an NIH R01 even up until 2009.
Under Dr. Ashman’s leadership, Iowa became highly ranked for rheumatology by US News & World Report. His trainees, many funded under Iowa’s first rheumatology T32, became leaders in the field throughout the country. Many of our own faculty still here today have stories to share about life-changing education, both professionally and personally, from Dr. Ashman. As they go on to practice, to instruct, and to research, his legacy will endure.
Before letting his team know, Immunology Division Director Benjamin Davis, MD, PhD, reached out to his predecessor, Scott Vogelgesang, MD, and another longtime colleague of Dr. Ashman’s, Zuhair Ballas, MD, for their thoughts.
Dr. Vogelgesang said:
Bob was one of the most intelligent, humble and optimistic people I have ever met. He never lost his interest in immunology, clinical rheumatology, and the careers of his colleagues. He will be missed.
Dr. Ballas said:
He was truly a renaissance person with many interests outside medicine including bird watching. He was always the optimist looking for the silver lining.
