Ezekiel J. Emanuel

Ezekiel J. Emanuel, MD, PhD, is Vice Provost for Global Initiatives and the Diane v.S. Levy and Robert M. Levy University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He holds appointments in the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy in the Perelman School of Medicine and the Department of Health Care Management in the Wharton School. Dr. Emanuel is an oncologist and world leader in health policy and bioethics. He is Special Advisor to the Director General of the WHO, Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He was founding chair of the Department of Bioethics at the NIH.

He served as a Special Advisor on Health Policy to the Director of the Office of Management and Budget and National Economic Council. In this role, he was instrumental in drafting the Affordable Care Act. Dr. Emanuel is the most widely cited bioethicist in history with over 350 publications. He has authored or edited 16 books.

His numerous awards include election to the Institute of Medicine (IOM) of the National Academy of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Association of American Physicians, and the Royal College of Medicine (UK). He received –but refused— a Fulbright Scholarship. In 2026, Dr. Emanuel was elected to the American Philosophical Society (APS) and selected as The Hastings Center’s 2026 Bioethics Founders Award Honoree.

Dr. Emanuel earned an MD (1988) & PhD in political philosophy (1989) from Harvard University, an MSc in Biochemistry at Oxford University (1981), and BA in Chemistry, Amherst College.

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