Peter Rodriguez, dean of Rice Business, sat down Jan. 14 with Dr. Wayne Riley ’02, president of SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University, to gather insights about Riley’s leadership of complex health care organizations. The event was the first of the 2026 season’s Rice Business Partners’ Thought Leadership Series.
Riley completed his medical residency training in internal medicine at Houston’s Baylor College of Medicine and served on the medical staffs of Houston Methodist, St. Luke’s Episcopal, DeBakey Veterans Affairs Hospital and Ben Taub Hospital. He explained how his experience serving on hospital committees showed his prowess for administrative work — something he hadn’t considered before.
Then a friend suggested he pursue an MBA, and Riley turned to Rice for the next step in his career. He shared memories of his time with Rice professors such as Duane Windsor and the late Edward Williams.
“(Williams) sort of highlighted that there’s room for — in my mind — for entrepreneurship in health care, something I’d never been exposed to,” Riley said. “I took a leadership elective from Brent Smith, and he introduced this concept that I had never heard of. It’s called ‘executive derailment.’ And you know what that means, friends? It means that people who get into leadership positions either self-sabotage themselves or have some issue that derails their career forever.
“There are clear signs and symptoms, just like when we diagnosed a patient, of executive derailment. These courses and professors imprinted on me in a major way the teaching and learning about leadership, complex organizations and management. We forget that the role of a leader is to manage people: the No. 1 asset of any organization.”
Riley’s resume includes a long list of increasingly senior positions in academia and health care, but the standout moments of his career include his work in Houston helping New Orleans refugees during Hurricane Katrina and his work in New York City helping patients during the COVID-19 pandemic at the country’s solitary COVID-only hospital.
“We had 300 people in the hospital with COVID,” Riley said. “We had run out of oxygen at one point. That’s how sick these folks were. So your crisis leadership skills kick in.”
In the first few weeks of the pandemic, personal protective equipment (PPE) supplies were gone. The supply chain was crippled. Hospital staff began bargaining and trading with other nearby hospitals until Riley had a novel idea.
“If I can’t get PPE, ponchos can work until the supply chains get a little more established,” he said. “So I made a couple calls. I finally reached the community affairs lead at the New York Yankees. And I said, ‘Is there any way you could send me 10,000 ponchos?’”
The Yankees were able to send 10,000 ponchos by 5 o’clock that day and another 20,000 the next week.
“That’s what you do,” Riley said. “You kick in to find resources and take care of your patients.”
Rice Business Partners connects with the business community in Houston, in Texas and around the country to provide lifelong learning and thought leadership, opening doors to partnerships and energizing growth. Rodriguez described the extensive, year-round effort that goes into selecting speakers for Rice Business events — the planning process begins months in advance with organizers carefully considering which CEOs and executives they hope to invite and building a wish list that evolves over time. That commitment, he noted, has consistently resulted in high-profile leaders visiting Rice, including multiple company CEOs last year and an upcoming appearance by the CFO of AT&T Pascal Desroches Feb. 5. View upcoming events here.