Southern Fall/Winter 2022

PAYING IT FORWARD
Karen McKoy ’71
When dermatologist Dr. Karen McKoy ’71 met her husband, he
was working as a gastroenterologist at Cambridge Hospital in Boston.
“I joke that I do the outside, and he does the inside,” she says.
The couple soon discovered that they shared a deep desire to
serve others in their professional and civic capacities, and both have
taught and mentored students throughout their careers. In 2021,
they founded the Karen C. McKoy and Paul B. Lesser Endowed
Scholarship in the Health Sciences at Birmingham-Southern
College. The scholarship is designated for students who would like
to go into healthcare-related fields, especially under-represented
first-generation or minority students. McKoy attended BSC on a merit
scholarship. Her volunteer efforts over the years include working on
Project HOPE, a U.S. Navy hospital ship that provided relief after the
2004 Indonesian earthquake and tsunami disaster, and participating
in the MAVEN Project (Medical Alumni Volunteer Expert Network)
through teledermatology.
McKoy earned a degree in chemistry from Birmingham-
Southern, where she was a member of Pi Beta Phi, and her M.D.
from the UAB School of Medicine. During an internship at
Yale University, she decided to pursue dermatology as a subspecialty.
She then earned a Master of Public Heath degree from
the Harvard School of Public Health in 2006. She worked as a
dermatologist for 40 years at Lahey Hospital and Medical Center
in Boston before retiring.
“I never went back to practice in Alabama, but there is a dearth
of healthcare professionals there,” she says. “The scholarship is
another way to give back to the state of Alabama, not only to
Birmingham-Southern, because I also received a state-funded merit
scholarship for medical school.”
Her graduating class of 1971 recently celebrated its 50th reunion
and established The Class of 1971 Endowed Scholarship Hilltop
Tribute, to which McKoy has also contributed.
McKoy says that she was drawn to dermatology as a sub-specialty
of medicine because of how it’s practiced. “It’s not emergency-room
medicine,” she says. “You have a lot of time to think about what is
happening with a patient. You can serve all ages of patients, from
newborn to geriatric, and all sorts of diseases which are related to
internal medicine in terms of showing signs of internal disease. I’m
a visual learner. I like to see what’s going on, rather than listening
through a stethoscope and trying to guess what’s going on.”
She recalls her years at Birmingham-Southern as being very
influential in terms of the civic mindset that she and Lesser
continue to embody.
“I feel that I’ve been given a good chance to do what I’ve wanted
to do in life, and Birmingham-Southern was a huge part of that.”
62 / ’southern