Ezekiel J. Emanuel, MD, PhD, is 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 world leader in health policy and bioethics. He is a Special Advisor to the Director General of the World Health Organization, Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, and member of the Council on Foreign Relations.  He was founding chair of the Department of Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health and held that position until August of 2011. From 2009 to 2011, he served as a Special Advisor on Health Policy to the Director of the Office of Management and Budget and National Economic Council. In this role, 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.  He has over 350 publications and has authored or edited 16 books. Recent books include Eat Your Ice Cream (2026), Which Country Has the World’s Best Health Care (2020), Prescription for the Future (2017), Reinventing American Health Care: How the Affordable Care Act Will Improve our Terribly Complex, Blatantly Unjust, Outrageously Expensive, Grossly Inefficient, Error Prone System (2014) and Brothers Emanuel (2013).  

Dr. Emanuel regularly contributes to the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, and appears on BBC, NPR, CNN, MSNBC, CNBC and other media outlets.  

He has received numerous awards including election to the Institute of Medicine (IOM) of the National Academy of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Association of American Physicians, and the Royal College of Medicine (UK). He received –but refused— a Fulbright Scholarship.  He was a Guggenheim Fellow.

He has been named the Dan David Prize Laureate in Bioethics, a recipient of the AMA-Burroughs Wellcome Leadership Award, the Public Service Award from the American Society of Clinical Oncology, Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Society of Bioethics and Humanities, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation David E. Rogers Award, President's Medal for Social Justice Roosevelt University, the John Mendelsohn Award from the MD Anderson Cancer Center and recipient of the Patricia Price Browne Prize in Biomedical Ethics.

Dr. Emanuel received honorary degrees from Icahn School of Medicine at Mt. Sinai, Union Graduate College, the Medical College of Wisconsin, and Macalester College.

Dr. Emanuel 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).