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.
