Ezekiel J. Emanuel

Ezekiel J. Emanuel is a senior fellow at American Progress and the vice provost for global initiatives, the Diane S. Levy and Robert M. Levy University Professor, and chair of the department of medical ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania. He is also an op-ed contributor to The New York Times.

He was the founding chair of the department of bioethics at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and held that position until August 2011. Until January 2011, he served as a special adviser on health policy to the Office of Management and Budget director and the National Economic Council. He is also a breast oncologist and author.

After completing Amherst College, he received his Master of Science from Oxford University biochemistry. He received his M.D. from Harvard Medical School and his Ph.D. in political philosophy from Harvard University. His dissertation received the Toppan Award for the finest political science dissertation of the year. 

In 1987 and 1988, he was a fellow in the program in ethics and professions at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. After completing his internship and residency in internal medicine at Boston’s Beth Israel Hospital and his oncology fellowship at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, he joined the faculty at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Dr. Emanuel was an associate professor at Harvard Medical School before joining the NIH.

Dr. Emanuel has authored three books, co-edited four, and will have two forthcoming books in 2012. His publications include The Oxford Textbook of Clinical Research Ethics, edited by Dr. Emanuel and members of the NIH Department of Bioethics and Healthcare; Guaranteed, Dr. Emanuel’s own recommendations for health care reform; and Exploitation and Developing Countries. 

His book on medical ethics, The Ends of Human Life, has been widely praised and received an honorable mention for the Rosenhaupt Memorial Book Award by the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. Dr. Emanuel has also published No Margin, No Mission: Health-Care Organizations and the Quest for Ethical Excellence and co-edited Ethical and Regulatory Aspects of Clinical Research: Readings and Commentary.

Dr. Emanuel developed “The Medical Directive,” a comprehensive living will that has been endorsed by Consumer Reports on Health, Harvard Health Letter, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and many other publications. He has published widely on the ethics of clinical research, health care reform, international research ethics, end-of-life care issues, euthanasia, the ethics of managed care, and the physician-patient relationship in the New England Journal of Medicine, the Lancet, the Journal of the American Medical Association, and many other medical journals.