About SUNY

Associate Vice Chancellor for Health Affairs

Kathleen Preston joined SUNY in 2008. In her role as Associate Vice Chancellor for Health Affairs, Ms. Preston is responsible for leading the Office of Academic Health and Hospital Affairs at SUNY System Administration. In that capacity she supports the mission and operations of SUNY's four Academic Health Centers, the College of Optometry and the Long Island State Veterans' Home, by providing consultative assistance with policy formulation and strategic planning and implementation. In her role to provide oversight to the Board of Trustees, Ms. Preston has focused on hospital finances and operations, and reporting on quality improvement programs.  Noteworthy among her accomplishments at SUNY are her participation in the development of SUNY REACH, a proposal to raise the profile of SUNY academic health research, and her efforts to negotiate greater procurement flexibility for the SUNY hospitals. From September 2010 through July 2011, Ms. Preston served as Interim Vice Chancellor for Financial Services and Health Affairs

Prior to joining SUNY, Ms. Preston spent 13 years at the New York State Senate Finance Committee, starting as the senior budget analyst responsible for health care financing and policy, and rising to the position of Assistant Director of the Committee, responsible for overseeing health care, higher education, transportation and human services issues, and coordinating and supervising budget and policy negotiations in those issue areas. While at the Finance Committee, she assisted in developing, negotiating and overseeing the implementation of the GenNYsis biotechnology development program to provide funding to higher education institutions to assist them in the development of biomedical research infrastructure. Ms. Preston has also been a volunteer with Northeastern New York Komen Race for the Cure for over a decade.

Ms. Preston holds a Masters in Public Administration from the Maxwell School at Syracuse University and a B.A. in Social Science from St. Bonaventure University.