Ezekiel J. Emanuel, MD, PhD, is the 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 a world leader in health policy and bioethics. He serves as a special advisor to the Director-General of the World Health Organization, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He was the founding chair of the Department of Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health, a position he held until August 2011. From 2009 to 2011, he served as special advisor on Health Policy to the Director of the Office of Management and Budget and the National Economic Council, where he was instrumental in drafting the Affordable Care Act (ACA). He also served on the Biden-Harris Transition COVID Advisory Board.
Dr. Emanuel is the most widely cited bioethicist in history, with more than 350 publications and 16 authored or edited books. His most recent book, Eat Your Ice Cream, was published on January 6, 2026. In that same year, he was elected to the American Philosophical Society, one of the nation’s oldest and most prestigious learned societies.
He has received numerous honors, including election to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Association of American Physicians, and the Royal College of Medicine (UK). He was a Guggenheim Fellow and was awarded—though declined—a Fulbright Scholarship.
His many distinctions include the Dan David Prize Laureate in Bioethics, the AMA-Burroughs Wellcome Leadership Award, the Public Service Award from the American Society of Clinical Oncology, the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Society of Bioethics and Humanities, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation David E. Rogers Award, the President's Medal for Social Justice from Roosevelt University, the John Mendelsohn Award from MD Anderson Cancer Center, and the Patricia Price Browne Prize in Biomedical Ethics.
Dr. Emanuel has received honorary degrees from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, Union Graduate College, the Medical College of Wisconsin, and Macalester College.
He earned an MD (1988) and a PhD in political philosophy (1989) from Harvard University, an MSc in biochemistry from Oxford University (1981), and a BA in chemistry from Amherst College (1979).
