Aaron Kesselheim, MD, JD, MPH

Aaron S. Kesselheim MD JD MPH is a Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and a faculty member in the Division of Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacoeconomics in the Department of Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Within the Division, Aaron created and leads the Program On Regulation, Therapeutics, And Law (PORTAL, www.PORTALresearch.org), an interdisciplinary research core focusing on intersections among prescription drugs and medical devices, patient health outcomes, and regulatory practices and the law. PORTAL is now among the largest, non-industry-funded academic centers focusing on these issues in the country.

Author of over 600 publications in the peer-reviewed medical and health policy literatures, Aaron has testified before Congress on pharmaceutical policy, medical device regulation, generic drugs, and modernizing clinical trials. Aaron is a core faculty member at the HMS Center for Bioethics, where he co-teaches a course on health policy, law, and bioethics and organizes a monthly policy and ethics seminar series. Aaron also serves as a Visiting Professor of Law at Yale Law School and at the Yale School of Public Health, where he teaches yearly courses on Food and Drug Administration Law and Policy. He recently developed a massive open online course called Prescription Drug Regulation, Cost, and Access: Current Controversies in Context that has been disseminated via the HarvardX platform to over 100,000 participants world-wide (and is available for viewing here: https://www.edx.org/course/the-fda-and-prescription-drugs-current-controversies-in-context).

He is the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Law, Medicine, and Ethics. In 2020, he was elected to the National Academy of Medicine, one of the highest honors in the fields of health and medicine, in recognition of “his national leadership in studying how prescription drugs and medical devices interact with regulatory practices and the law to affect patient health outcomes.”