In this new partnership between the Penn Humanities Forum and the Chicago Humanities Festival, Dr. Ezekial Emanuel will speak at the 23rd annual Chicago Humanities Festival on pressing issues facing U.S. health care today, from access to insurance to the overall cost of American medicine.

An internationally renowned bioethicist and key figure in the U.S. debate on health care reform, Dr. Emanuel is out to change the world. Before joining Penn in 2011, Emanuel served in the Obama Administration as Special Advisor for Health Policy to the Director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, was on the faculty of Harvard Medical School, served on President Clinton's Health Care Task Force, and spent 14 years at the National Institutes of Health.

In addition to his role at Penn as Vice Provost for Global Initiatives, Dr. Emanuel holds joint faculty appointments in the departments of Medical Ethics and Health Policy, a new Perelman School of Medicine program which he chairs, and Health Care Management in the Wharton School. He is widely published in such leading medical journals as The New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, and JAMA on such topics as health care reform, the ethics of clinical research, end-of-life care, managed care, and the physician-patient relationship. His articles and op eds also frequently appear in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The New Republic, and many other publications. His landmark study The Ends of Human Life: Medical Ethics in a Liberal Polity (Harvard University Press, 1991) considers the seeming irresolvabiility of moral disputes in medicine.