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LDI Senior Fellow Ezekiel Emanuel Named 2023 Guggenheim Fellow

Will be Working on a Book About the Creative Rejuvenation of the Health Care System

April 27, 2023

By:

Hoag Levins

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University of Pennsylvania Vice Provost for Global Initiatives and LDI Senior Fellow Ezekiel Emanuel, MD, PhD, has been named a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow.

A Professor at both the Perelman School of Medicine and Wharton School, Emanuel joins three other Penn professors and 167 other scientists, writers, scholars, and artists in 48 fields selected on the basis of their “prior achievements and exceptional promise,” according to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

The 98-year-old Guggenheim Fellowship grant program is designed to “further the development of scholars and artists by assisting them to engage in research in any field of knowledge and creation in any of the arts, under the freest possible conditions.”

Creative Rejuvenation of Health Care

During his fellowship, Emanuel will be working on a book entitled Creative Rejuvenation: Curing the Ills of American Medicine and Civil Society. He explained, “Creative Rejuvenation is the flip side of creative destruction which works in the market but does not work in transforming public systems like health care, education, taxes etc. The idea is to use health care for a general issue of 1) why institutional resistance to change is inevitable, 2) the need to have a way of rejuvenating the structural elements, and 3) examples of how it has occurred to derive general principles.”

A world-renowned bioethicist and health policy expert, Emanuel is currently Professor and Co-Director of the Penn’s Healthcare Transformation Institute and the Special Advisory to the Director General of the World Health Organization (WHO). He has written and edited 15 books and over 350 articles and is a regular contributor to the New York Times, the Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. He also makes regular appearances on the BBC, NPR, CNN, MSNBC, and other media outlets.

A Founding Chair of the Department of Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health, he also was a Special Advisor for Health Policy to the director of the Office of Management and Budget in the White House and was one of the architects of the Affordable Care Act. He later served on the Biden-Harris Transition COVID-19 Advisory Board.

Emanuel, a breast oncologist, joined Penn in 2011. Between then and 2020, he served as Chair of the Penn Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy.