Aaron Kesselheim

Aaron S. Kesselheim, MD, JD, MPH

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Director, Program on Regulation, Therapeutics and Law

Brigham & Women’s Hospital
Department of Medicine
Division of Pharmacoepidemiology & Pharmacoeconomics
1620 Tremont Street, Suite 3030
Boston, MA 02120

akesselheim@partners.org
Phone: 617-278-0930 | Fax: 617-232-8602

Aaron S. Kesselheim, M.D., J.D., M.P.H., is an Associate 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. He graduated from Harvard College and received his postgraduate training at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and Law School, and most recently at the Harvard School of Public Health. He is Board Certified in Internal Medicine, and serves as a primary care physician at the Phyllis Jen Center for Primary Care at BWH. His research focuses on the effects of intellectual property laws and regulatory policies on pharmaceutical development, the drug approval process, and the costs, availability, and use of prescription drugs both domestically and in resource-poor settings. He has also investigated how other issues at the intersection of law and public health can affect the health care system, including health care fraud, expert testimony in malpractice cases, and insurance reimbursement practices. He is a member of the New York State Bar and is a Patent Attorney.

Within the Division, Dr. Kesselheim leads the Program On Regulation, Therapeutics, And Law (PORTAL), an interdisciplinary research core focusing on intersections among prescription drugs and medical devices, patient health outcomes, and regulatory practices and the law. In 2013, Dr. Kesselheim was named a Greenwall Faculty Scholar in Bioethics by the Greenwall Foundation, which supports innovative empirical research in bioethics. Dr. Kesselheim’s work is also currently funded by the Laura and John Arnold Foundation and the Harvard Program in Therapeutic Science. In the past, he has received research support from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the FDA, a Robert Wood Johnson Investigator Award in Health Policy Research, the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University, Pew Charitable Trusts, and the Harvard Clinical and Translational Science Center.

Dr. Kesselheim has received wide recognition for his work. In 2012, he was named to the Perspectives Advisory Board of the New England Journal of Medicine. He has testified before Congress on pharmaceutical policy, medical device regulation, generic drugs, and modernizing clinical trials, and served as a consultant for the NIH, FDA, Institute of Medicine, USPTO, and numerous state government offices. He has been a visiting scholar at the Yale School of Medicine and School of Management. In 2010, he received the prestigious Alice S. Hersh New Investigator Award from AcademyHealth, the leading professional organization for health services/policy research. The Hersh award is given annually to an outstanding health services researcher under age 40 in the US.

Dr. Kesselheim also serves as a faculty supervisor for the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School, a faculty member of the Harvard Center for Bioethics, and a Research Associate in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard School of Public Health.

He has been appointed a Visiting Associate Professor of Law at Yale Law School, where taught Food and Drug Administration Law in 2014-2015 and 2016-2017. In 2017-2018, his FDA Law and Policy course will be co-listed with the Yale School of Public Health and Yale Medical School.

Selected Publications (from >300) | Current PubMed Search Results