John B. Hess

Chairman, Mount Sinai Health System Board of Trustees

John B. Hess was elected Chairman of the Mount Sinai Health System Boards of Trustees in March 2026. In this role, he works closely with Health System leadership and fellow trustees to advance Mount Sinai’s mission of delivering exceptional patient care, driving groundbreaking research, and educating the next generation of physicians and scientists.

Mr. Hess became a Mount Sinai trustee in 1988, and served as Chairman of the Research Committee of the Boards of Trustees and as a member of the Executive and Strategic Planning committees. Over decades of leadership and service, he has helped guide Mount Sinai’s growth to become a top integrated academic health system and a global leader in biomedical discovery.  

Mr. Hess served for three decades as Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Hess Corporation, leading the Fortune 500 company through a strategic transformation from an integrated oil company into a global independent exploration and production company that culminated in its 2025 merger with Chevron. In addition to his longstanding Trusteeship at Mount Sinai, Mr. Hess serves on the Board of Directors of Chevron and Goldman Sachs, the Board of Trustees of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Board of Directors of the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts and the New York Philharmonic, and the Board of Dean’s Advisors at Harvard Business School, among other leadership roles in business, education, and the arts. 

The Leon and Norma Hess Center for Science and Medicine, a 500,000-square-foot research facility on Mount Sinai’s campus established in 2012, was made possible by the Hess family’s commitment to advancing translational science and interdisciplinary collaboration. The Hess Center is home to leading institutes in neuroscience, cancer, genomics, cardiovascular research, and children’s health, among others. 

In July 2022, the Mount Sinai Health System and Hess Corporation embarked on a transformative health effort to improve health care in Guyana, funded jointly by the Government of Guyana and Hess Corporation. In its first four years, more than 83,000 Guyanese children received health screenings, over 1,200 new nursing assistants graduated in 2025, a new state-of-the-art pathology lab reduced diagnosis times and accelerated life-saving treatments, and the first Digital Health Training Institute was launched to create an digital health workforce with 250 professionals to be trained in the first year. In March 2025, the Government of Guyana, the Mount Sinai Health System, and Hess Corporation announced a five-year extension of the national health care initiative through 2030.