Salt Lake City-based ARUP Laboratories has announced that Andy Theurer, currently the organization’s president, has been appointed by the company’s board of directors to become CEO. Theurer replaced retiring CEO Dr. Sherrie L. Perkins. Dr. Tracy George will replace Theurer as president and will retain her current position as ARUP’s chief medical officer.
Theurer has been with ARUP for more than 30 years, having joined the company as an assistant controller in 1991. Before becoming president in 2017, when Perkins became CEO, he had been senior vice president and chief financial officer for 17 years. Theurer has been a member of ARUP’s executive committee and a member of the company’s board of directors for more than two decades.
“I am very grateful to Sherrie Perkins for her exceptional leadership as CEO and for her many other extraordinary contributions to ARUP and the University of Utah School of Medicine,” said Dr. Peter E. Jensen, chairman of the ARUP board of directors and of the UofU School of Medicine Department of Pathology. “She has demonstrated a true commitment to ARUP and the work we do that has such an impact on patients and on our clients nationwide. She will be sorely missed.”
Perkins, a hematopathologist and an internationally known expert in pediatric lymphoma, joined ARUP in 1990 as a fellow, and since then has held numerous leadership roles at ARUP and in the UofU Department of Pathology. In addition, she has a record of other accomplishments as a clinician, researcher and educator. She replaced Dr. Edgar Braendle as CEO in August 2017. Perkins led ARUP through a time of enormous growth and change, and recently through a global pandemic. She oversaw a major expansion with the construction of ARUP’s new 220,000-square-foot facility in the UofU Research Park. Perkins also reorganized ARUP’s executive committee and made changes to further improve operations, quality and information technology, Jensen said.
“It has been an honor to spend the majority of my career at ARUP and the University of Utah,” Perkins said. “ARUP continues to grow and thrive as a business without ever losing sight of its academic focus and its responsibility to advance knowledge about laboratory medicine. We have some of the best employees in the industry, who always put the patient first.”
In his new role, Theurer said he will continue to “share ARUP’s success with the nearly 4,500 employees who work so hard for the patients we serve.” He authored and implemented the company’s employee incentive and profit-sharing programs.
“The moment I arrived at ARUP, I knew this was where I would build my career,” Theurer said. “It’s been a privilege to work alongside Sherrie and learn from a brilliant physician, scientist and a friend. I am humbled to have been chosen to carry our vision for ARUP forward.”
George, a hematopathologist and internationally recognized expert on mast cell disorders, has been ARUP’s CMO since September 2020. She joined the company in 2018 as executive director of clinical trials and ARUP’s PharmaDx program, a role in which she led significant growth of that segment of ARUP’s business while also serving as a member of ARUP’s research and development executive committee.
A professor in the Department of Pathology at the Uof U, George came to ARUP from TriCore Reference Laboratories, where she was chief of hematopathology and vice chairwoman of clinical affairs for the University of New Mexico Department of Pathology. Before that, she spent 10 years at the Stanford School of Medicine as a faculty member.
Founded in 1984, ARUP Laboratories is a national reference laboratory and a nonprofit enterprise of the University of Utah and its Department of Pathology.