Carol Kay Conrad

Carol Kay Conrad November 7, 1961 - November 28, 2024 Carol K. Conrad, MD, amazing sister, aunt, and pediatric pulmonologist at Stanford Medicine Children's Health, passed away on November 28, 2024 at her home in Menlo Park, Calif., following a long battle with a neurodegenerative disease. Carol was born in Denver and grew up in southern California with her older brothers Jamie and David and her younger sister Libby, who were raised in a famously clever family by their mother, Kay, and their father, Paul, a three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning political cartoonist. Carol graduated from Rolling Hills High School in 1979 and went on to college at the University of California, Berkeley. After graduating from Cal in 1983, Carol received her medical degree from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1989 and trained in pediatrics at Children's Hospital Los Angeles. She then chose to specialize in pediatric pulmonary medicine, completing fellowship training at The Johns Hopkins University in 1995 and playing a central role in demonstrating proof-of-concept for gene therapy in cystic fibrosis. In 1995, Carol began work at Stanford's Lucile Packard Children's Hospital and worked diligently to build renowned pulmonary medicine programs. "Carol contributed in every way possible, whether it was treating patients with bronchopulmonary dysplasia or childhood interstitial lung diseases," said David Cornfield, MD, Chief of Pulmonary, Asthma, and Sleep Medicine at Stanford Children's and a longtime colleague of Carol's. "Her research on cystic fibrosis (CF) has contributed to the development of therapeutic interventions designed to specifically treat lung disease in children and adults with CF." As the pulmonary division grew, Carol's role expanded. She served as the director of the Pulmonary Function Lab, which brought state-of-the-art equipment that specialists could use to diagnose and treat young children and teens with many different lung or breathing conditions. Starting in 2004 she served as Medical Director of Stanford Children's Pediatric Lung and Heart-lung Transplant Program up until 2023. The program celebrated 35 years of lung and heart-lung transplants for children earlier this year. Carol will be remembered by her patients and her colleagues as an intellectually nimble, energetic, honest, and fierce patient advocate. Both as a professor of pediatrics at Stanford School of Medicine and a physician treating young lung patients, she touched the lives of countless patients, families, trainees, and colleagues with clarity of thought and careful attention to each person. In her personal life, Carol was a devoted aunt and sister, adventurer, traveler, early Burning Man participant as a fire dancer and house doctor, and physical fitness advocate. Her travels took her to exotic locations throughout the world, including New Zealand, Central and South America, Europe, and southeast Asia, and she was planning to go to Antarctica in early 2025. Her interest in sports began at a young age, and she became a lifelong skier and softball and soccer devotee, managing the co-ed softball team "Cha Cha Lucys" in the Stanford rec league, and helping her brother Jamie coach her niece Taylor's soccer teams. Beginning with her adoption of an abandoned kitten she named Shermie while still an undergraduate at Cal, she became a lifelong cat owner, later making a home for her rescued kitties Julie, Toughie, and Teddy over the years. Though proud of her Stanford affiliation, she remained an ardent Cal Bear football fan all her life, sometimes taking joy in being the only Cal fan, and a vocal one at that, in the Stanford rooting section during Big Games. Carol will be remembered for her passion, her energy, her disgust for hypocrisy and injustice, as well as for her warmth and sense of humor. As a longtime friend said, "She was fierce, decisive, brilliant, and fearless. She was a force to be reckoned with her whole life, and certainly made her mark!"