Ezekiel “Zeke” Emanuel, a world-class scholar of bioethics and health, leads a class of 22 new Wharton faculty members.
Emanuel’s appointment as the Diane v.S. Levy and Robert M. Levy University Professor is shared between Wharton’s Department of Health Care Management and the Perelman School of Medicine’s Department of Medical Ethics & Health Policy. He will also be Penn’s Vice Provost for Global Initiatives and the inaugural chair of the Perelman School’s Department of Medical Ethics & Health Policy.
“I’m beginning to wonder why I’ve been against cloning all these years. It will be necessary now,” Emanuel jokes.
The newest Penn Integrates Knowledge (PIK) professor, Emanuel chose Penn because of the opportunity to bridge disciplines. He is an oncologist who served as head of the Department of Bioethics at the Clinical Center of the National Institutes of Health and special advisor for health policy to the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget. His work has spanned topics such as health-care reform, end-of-life care and the physician-patient relationship.
“No other university was so daring to put it all together,” he says. “When I teach, I want business students in there with law students, med students, nursing students, advanced undergraduates. I want that combination in the room. Penn is one of the few places where that can happen.”
As vice provost, Emanuel will work closely with Dean Thomas S. Robertson and Harbir Singh, Mack Professor of Management and Wharton’s Vice Dean of Global Initiatives.
“I’m looking forward to benefiting from the work and thought they’ve put into this. Wharton and Lauder have an unbelievable alumni network that will help us tremendously in terms of identifying collaborations in the future,” he says.
In keeping with this interdisciplinary focus, Wharton welcomed two other PIK appointments earlier this year: Barbara Mellers, an influential scholar of decision-making, and Philip Tetlock, an award-winning scholar of political psychology and organizational behavior. Mellers is the I. George Heyman University Professor with an appointment shared between the Department of Psychology in the School of Arts and Sciences and Wharton’s Department of Marketing. Tetlock is the Leonore Annenberg University Professor with an appointment shared between the College’s Department of Psychology and Wharton’s Department of Management.
The PIK program was launched by President Amy Gutmann in 2005 as a University-wide initiative to recruit exceptional faculty members whose research and teaching exemplify the integration of knowledge across disciplines. PIK professors are jointly appointed between two Penn schools.
Wharton’s faculty now includes 230 full-time professors.