Meet Jonathan Epstein, the new interim dean at Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine

Jonathan A. Epstein has been named the interim dean at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, filling the job held by J. Larry Jameson until he was named interim president of the entire university on Tuesday.

Epstein had been serving as the executive vice dean and chief scientific officer of the medical school. In addition to his new role as interim dean, he also will serve as interim executive vice president of the university for its health system, the university said Tuesday.

The moves followed the resignation of Penn president Liz Magill on Saturday.

Epstein, 62, is a cardiologist and researcher who was hired at Penn in 1996 after completing two fellowships at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. In his new role, he oversees 3,000 full-time faculty at Penn and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, with responsibilities that include research, medical education, and the treatment of patients.

In an interview Wednesday, the Harvard-trained physician said he also plans to maintain his research lab, though he acknowledged that role will take a back seat to his other duties.

In 2022, he was a senior author of a study showing that cardiac fibrosis, a type of heart disease, could be tackled by marrying two recent Penn innovations that originally were developed for other purposes: the anticancer weapon CAR-T and the vaccine scaffold called messenger RNA. His coauthors included Penn CAR-T scientist Carl June and immunologist Drew Weissman, who shared this year’s Nobel Prize in medicine with colleague Katalin Karikó for their research on mRNA.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

My top priorities are to continue the leadership in making great discoveries, turning them into new cures, and getting them to patients in need.

Penn has been one of the leaders in doing this effectively, and I certainly want to see that continue and accelerate. The science that’s being produced here is better than it was 20 years ago, and it’s going to be even better 20 years from now.

It’s not just Drew Weissman and Carl June and [gene therapy researcher] Jim Wilson. It’s 30 or 40 or 50 other midlevel people who are going to be the future Nobel Prize winners and stars.

I want to help out in any way I can. I’ve been at Penn for a long time, for 27 years, and I love the place. And if I can contribute and be helpful in a leadership role, I’m happy to do that.

If the feeling is that somebody else should do it [over the long term], I’m fine with that.

Clinical research takes place in the health system and is part of the delivery of care. And it also is connected to our educational mission.

I really don’t look at it as moving from one domain to another, but really overseeing a unified health system and our multiple and intertwined missions.

The main mission of the school of medicine is focused on caring for patients and finding cures and science.

But we are not immune from the controversies that affect the entire campus, the city, and the country. To that extent, it is disruptive and upsetting to see conflict and pain in the world. That affects our students and our faculty and our staff.

But as I walk around the hospital and the campus, I don’t see disruptions or other activities. I read more about it in the newspaper.