LISA KANTROWITZ

KANTROWITZ--Lisa Robin M.D., of Brooklyn, NY and Chilmark, MA passed away on Sunday, June 6 after a twenty-three year battle with cancer, with her intellect intact. She was sixty-eight years old. Lisa's ambition and capability carried her from Packer, to Ethical Culture Fieldston School, Stanford and the University of Michigan, where she earned her MD. Nowhere did she suffer fools lightly. Her boundless curiosity extended through her careers, first as a surgeon, then as an interventional radiologist and finally as an investor. In her first life, as a physician, she trained at Columbia Presbyterian and Mass General Hospital before serving as an attending at Yale New Haven Hospital and the University of California, Irvine. Lisa was a third generation physician, whose father, Adrian Kantrowitz, was a pioneering cardiac electrophysiologist and surgeon and performed the first human heart transplant in the United States. Her daughter, Olivia, continues that tradition as an Internal Medicine Resident. Lisa was enamored with the world and all of the specific joys she uncovered within it: understanding craftsmanship in botany, jewelry enamel and architecture, the latin names of animals and the nuances of equity derivatives. Cultivating her passions, and propagating them in others brought Lisa profound satisfaction. She gave impromptu seminars on the provenance of a ring, mapped family genealogy on napkins and expounded on the composition of a planned forest. She spoke with utmost sincerity on the geological trends of Martha's Vineyard, the tsar's patronage of talented artists and the immigrant histories of New York. There was no subject that could elude Lisa's consuming interest in life's inner workings, nor a room whose entire space she couldn't fill with her unique perspective and choice words. Her generosity manifested constantly: advising friends on their best path forward when confronting illness, shouldering her friends' burdens by listening and most of all, nurturing intellect in every child she met. "There is no 'can't'" was her fondest aphorism, recognizing the sanctity of preserving our innate ability to achieve. There was always a way for ducklings with Lisa, who harbored that same wonder throughout her life. Lisa's values: discovery, exchange and engagement with the broadest community possible, live on in her children: Sam and Ana, Alexander and Alexa, Peter and Allyson, and Olivia, her loving husband, Elliott, and her family. They echo the love she gave and has continued to receive from friends and family since her passing. Lisa is interred in Abel's Hill Cemetery, Chilmark.