Amy O'Brien-Ladner M.D.

Amy O'Brien-Ladner, MD

January 9, 2024

Kansas City, Missouri - Amy O'Brien-Ladner, 67, passed peacefully at Kansas City Hospice House on January 9, 2024.

Amy was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, at Tripler Army Medical Center in 1956. She graduated from El Dorado (Kansas) High School in 1974. She then attended the University of Kansas in Lawrence, where she met her husband Dale and studied physical therapy. Her professional calling was in medicine, however, and she enrolled at the University of Kansas Medical School in 1980. After medical school, she completed internal medicine residency, chief residency, and pulmonary and critical care fellowship at the University of Kansas Hospital, before joining the KU faculty in 1991.

As a physician and educator, Amy was known for her clinical acumen, excellence in teaching, and boundless empathy for her patients. She was a prolific researcher and published extensively in several areas of pulmonary medicine. She won many awards for her research, teaching, and leadership, including the Faculty Research Investigator Award and Ruth Bohan Teaching Professorship, KU's highest honors for medical faculty. Over her career she became Division Director of Pulmonary Medicine, Director of Intensive Care Units, Executive Vice Chair, and finally Interim Chair of Medicine from 2014 until her retirement as Professor Emerita in 2018.

To her family, Amy was brilliant, wickedly funny, and a fiercely loyal, loving, supportive wife to Dale and mother to Ben and Spencer. She was a gifted self-taught chef of spicy tomato pasta and chicken burritos, and loved to travel to watch her sons play college football and to the ocean. She found joy in simple things: a seat outside with a good view and a glass of wine; a walk by the water. Amy loved animals and was devoted to her schnauzers. She was deeply loved by her family and will be profoundly missed.

Amy is survived by her husband of 45 years, Dale; sons Ben (and wife Betsy Koehne, of Seattle, WA) and Spencer (and partner Lee Winter, of Missoula, MT); and sisters Kathryn, Bridget, and Mary. The family will have a private memorial service.