When Brian Connolly was only 34 he became the first layperson on the board of the Daughters of Charity. It was 1985 and he’d just been appointed CEO of Providence Hospital, a Daughters of Charity hospital in Southfield, Mich. Today he is president and CEO of Dearborn, Mich.-based Oakwood Healthcare, a four-hospital integrated health system serving a million people in southeast Michigan that includes Detroit. “There were 12 sisters in habit and me,” says Connolly of being one of the first of many lay executives to run a Catholic health system. Born in Detroit and raised in an Irish Catholic family with six brothers and a sister in its suburbs, his father owned an underground-construction firm and served on a local hospital board. That influenced Connolly to earn a Master’s in public health at the University of Michigan. After a consulting stint where he learned to apply industrial engineering concepts to hospitals, he worked at Oakwood for seven years before going to Providence as COO and then CEO for 14 years. He served as executive VP for Catholic Healthcare Partners’ 15-hospital Ohio region and then helped the Daughters of Charity buy back their California hospitals from Catholic Healthcare West. Connolly returned to Michigan to be near family and took the top job at Oakwood in 2007. He and Darcy, his wife of 43 years, have three adult children, a son who’s a lawyer and two daughters, an occupational therapist and a teacher.