PHILADELPHIA -- Ezekiel J. Emanuel, a globally renowned bioethicist, will join the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania as the 13th Penn Integrates Knowledge University Professor, beginning Sept. 1. 

The announcement was made by Penn President Amy Gutmann and Provost Vincent Price.

Emanuel's title will be Diane v.S. Levy and Robert M. Levy University Professor and vice provost for global initiatives.  His appointment will be shared between the Department of Medical Ethics & Health Policy, which he will chair in Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine, and the Department of Health Care Management in the Wharton School, pending formal ratification by the School faculties, the Provost’s Staff Conference and the University trustees.

“The University of Pennsylvania is tremendously fortunate to have attracted to our faculty one of the most insightful and well-respected bioethicists of our time,” Gutmann said. “Zeke Emanuel is an eminent scholar, a passionate teacher, a collaborative leader and a tireless public servant. He has time and again demonstrated the vital importance of putting the broadest and deepest understandings to work in service of others. I am delighted that he will join the ranks of our esteemed Penn Integrates Knowledge University Professors.”

Emanuel, one of the world’s leading scholars of bioethics and health care, will be the inaugural chair of the Perelman School’s new Department of Medical Ethics & Health Policy.

The founding chair of the Department of Bioethics at The Clinical Center of the National Institutes of Health since 1997, he served from February 2009 to January 2011 as special advisor for health policy to the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget. 

Emanuel is an author or editor of nine books, including the landmark study The Ends of Human Life (Harvard University Press, 1991), and hundreds of articles and essays, across such topics as health-care reform, the ethics of clinical research, end-of-life care, managed care and the physician-patient relationship.  He has published in such leading medical journals as The New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet and JAMA, as well as in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The New Republic and many other publications. 

Emanuel has been elected to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences; served on President Clinton’s Task Force on National Health Care Reform, the National Bioethics Advisory Commission and the bioethics panel of the Pan American Health Organization; received such awards as the AMA-Burroughs Wellcome Leadership Award, the Public Service Award from the American Society of Clinical Oncology and the John Mendelsohn Award from the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center; and been a visiting professor at Stanford University, Johns Hopkins University, the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of Pittsburgh. 

“I am delighted to welcome Zeke Emanuel as vice provost for global initiatives,” Price said.  “The extraordinary range of experience and expertise that he brings to this new role will play a critical part in shaping our global activities in the years ahead. And his leadership in interdisciplinary knowledge, ethical inquiry and global engagement -- three of our most important values –- will prove a great asset to the entire Penn community.

Emanuel earned an M.D. in 1988 and a Ph.D. in political philosophy in 1989 from Harvard University, an M.Sci. in biochemistry in 1981 from Oxford University and a B.A. in chemistry in 1979 from Amherst College.  Before joining the NIH in 1997, he was associate professor of social medicine at the Harvard Medical School, where he had taught since 1992. 

The Penn Integrates Knowledge program was launched by Gutmann in 2005 as a University-wide initiative to recruit exceptional faculty members whose research and teaching exemplify the integration of knowledge across disciplines and who are jointly appointed between two schools at Penn.

The Diane v.S. Levy and Robert M. Levy University Professorship is the gift of Penn Trustee Robert M. Levy, a Wharton alumnus, and his wife, Diane v.S. Levy. 

Robert Levy is partner, chairman and chief investment officer of Harris Associates L.P., an investment management firm.  He is chair of Penn’s Investment Committee, co-chair of Making History:  The Campaign for Penn, chair of Innovation and Leadership:  The Campaign for Wharton and vice chairman of the Wharton Board of Overseers.

Diane Levy is a member of the Board of Overseers at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.