Dr. Aaron Kesselheim Elected to the National Academy of Medicine
Aaron S. Kesselheim, Sidley Austin–Robert D. McLean Visiting Professor in Law and a Distinguished Visitor at the Solomon Center for Health Law and Policy at Yale Law School, has been elected to the National Academy of Medicine.
Dr. Kesselheim, a leading scholar in health law and access to medicines, focuses his research 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.
“I am proud of so much we have done at the Solomon Center, but bringing incredible people into our health law and policy community has been one of the greatest joys,” said Solomon Center Faculty Director Abbe R. Gluck ’00. “Aaron is a terrific teacher and collaborator, and an endlessly generative scholar and mentor to our students. We couldn’t be more delighted that he received this much-deserved honor.”
At Yale Law School, Dr. Kesselheim teaches Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Law and often collaborates with Solomon Center Student Fellows on his projects.
“Dr. Kesselheim has been an incredibly supportive and engaged mentor in each of the projects that we have worked on together. He is enthusiastic about collaborating with students to turn research ideas into successful and impactful projects,” said Carolyn Lye ’22, who has worked with Dr. Kesselheim since her first year of law school.
Beyond his work at Yale, Dr. Kesselheim is a Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, a faculty member in the Division of Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacoeconomics in the Department of Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the Center for Bioethics at Harvard Medical School, a faculty supervisor at the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School, and a primary care physician at the Phyllis Jen Center for Primary Care at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Dr. Kesselheim also leads the Program On Regulation, Therapeutics, And Law (PORTAL) at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, an interdisciplinary research program focusing on intersections among prescription drugs and medical devices, patient health outcomes, and regulatory practices and the law.
Dr. Kesselheim has previously been appointed to committees for the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine on the opioid epidemic and bioidentical hormone replacement therapy and has testified before Congress on several issues of FDA regulation and pharmaceutical policy. He has also consulted for the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, and several state government offices. He serves as the Editor-In-Chief of the Journal of Law, Medicine, and Ethics and is a member of the Perspectives Advisory Board for the New England Journal of Medicine.
The National Academy of Medicine (NAM) is a national, nonprofit organization that provides advice on medicine, health policy, public health, and biomedical science. Members are elected to the National Academy of Medicine in recognition of their “outstanding professional achievement and commitment to service,” and it is “considered one of the highest honors in the fields of health and medicine,” according to the NAM.
