Skip to content
Business
Link copied to clipboard

Penn hires bioethicist Ezekiel Emanuel, brother of Rahm

Ezekiel J. Emanuel, a well known bioethicist who has worked at the National Institutes of Health and served as a special adviser for health policy to the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget between February 2009 and January 2011, will join the University of Pennsylvania faculty on Sept. 1.

Emanuel will have a slew of titles. Among them:  Diane v.S. Levy and Robert M. Levy University professor, vice provost for global initiatives and chair of the new department of Medical Ethics & Health Policy in the Perelman School of Medicine. He will also have an appointment to the Department of Health Care Management in the Wharton School.

Penn is already home to Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics and one of the nation's most widely quoted bioethicists. Caplan, 61, said he retired as chair of a smaller department of bioethics a year ago after 14 years in the job.

He said it was "time for new leadership, new vision." He said was thrilled with the hiring of Emanuel, who he said was clearly the best candidate for the job.

Caplan said he would continue to work at Penn. "I'm not ready to retire," he said. "I'm just ready to not fill out budget reports."

Penn president Amy Gutmann said Emanuel's appointment will make Penn "unrivaled in our scope and depth in bioethics, which is a priority of ours."

She said Penn is particularly interested in bioethics because "life sciences have never been more important both to our country and the world and there's obviously huge challenges surrounding medical care, medical research . . . and Zeke Emanuel is an expert in the whole range of knowledge and understanding that's needed to tackle these problems."

Emanuel will take on administrative duties, continue his scholarly work and teach students from undergraduates up. "He's got enormous breadth of knowledge and he has seemingly limitless energy," Gutmann said.

Emanuel was founding chair of the department of bioethics at The Clinical Center of the National Institutes of Health.

He received an M.D. in 1988 and a Ph.D. in political philosophy from Harvard University. He taught at Harvard between 1992 and 1997.

Ezekiel Emanuel, who was born in 1957, is the older brother of Rahm Emanuel, former White House chief of staff and current mayor of Chicago.