The John M. Eisenberg, MD Professorship in Medicine

EisenbergThis Professorship was established in 2019 when the value of the Thorne Sparkman, Jr., MD Professor had increased sufficiently to support a second professorship. The Sparkman professorship was created by Janet F. Haas, MD, and John Otto Haas who have been loyal advocates of the University and Penn Medicine and of excellence in medical care. The decision to name the chair in honor of John M. Eisenberg was made by the inaugural chairholder, Scott Halpern, MD.

John Meyer Eisenberg (1946-2002) dedicated his career to ensuring that health care was based on a strong foundation of research and was a champion of policy-relevant research to increase the value of health care services. At Penn, he founded the Division of General Internal Medicine. On the national stage, he held several key positions in academic and clinical medicine, including President of the Association for Health Services Research, President of the Society for General Internal Medicine, and Vice President of the Society for Medical Decision Making. From 1997 until shortly before his death, Dr. Eisenberg served as the Director for the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

Dr. Eisenberg came to Penn for his medical residency in 1972. He earned an MBA from Wharton in 1976. Along with his fellow resident and good friend Dr. Sankey Williams, he was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholar. Dr. Eisenberg joined the faculty of the Perelman School of Medicine in 1976. He served as founding Chief of the Division of General Internal Medicine from 1978 until 1992. He then moved on to Washington, DC, where he was Chair of the Department of Medicine and Physician-in-Chief at Georgetown University before joining the Department of Health and Human Services.

Dr. Eisenberg was passionate about improving primary care and examining it from the perspectives of various providers and patients. He worked on increasing research in neglected areas such as addressing disparities in health care. He wrote over 250 articles and book chapters on various topics, including physicians' practices, medical education, and clinical economics, and wrote the seminal book Doctors' Decisions and the Cost of Medical Care. He was committed to ensuring that limited health care dollars were used wisely and believed that clinical practice should be evidence-based and address the value of care delivered.


HalpernCurrent Chairholder
Scott Halpern, MD

Scott Halpern, MD, PhD is the inaugural John M. Eisenberg Professor in Medicine at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Halpern is also Professor of Medical Ethics and Health Policy and of Epidemiology. He is the founding Director of the Palliative and Advanced Illness Research (PAIR) Center. In addition, he is a member of the Center for Health Incentives and Behavioral Economics (CHIBE) leadership team, a Senior Fellow in the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics (LDI), and a practicing critical care physician at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. Through his research, Dr. Halpern seeks to develop and test interventions to improve the effectiveness, efficiency, and equity of health care delivery for patients with serious and critical illnesses.

After graduating from Duke University, Dr. Halpern completed medical school, graduate school, residency in internal medicine, and fellowship in pulmonary and critical care medicine all at Penn. He joined Penn’s faculty in 2009, becoming Professor in 2018.

Dr. Halpern’s research has been supported by more than two dozen grants, including most recently a P30 grant from the National Institute on Aging to establish and direct the Penn Roybal Center on Palliative Care in Dementia. He also directs the BETTER Center (Behavioral Economics to Transform Trial Enrollment Representativeness), funded by the American Heart Association.

He has been nationally recognized with awards such as AcademyHealth’s Alice S. Hersh New Investigator Award, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Young Leader Award, the American Federation for Medical Research’s Outstanding Investigator Award, and the Association of Clinical and Translational Science’s Distinguished Investigator Award. He is an elected member of the American Society of Clinical Investigation and the Association of American Physicians. At Penn Medicine, Dr. Halpern has received the Marjorie A. Bowman New Investigator Award, the Samuel Martin Health Evaluation Sciences Research Award, and the Arthur K. Asbury Outstanding Faculty Mentor Award in recognition of his unique commitment to mentorship, including service as the primary mentor on eight active “K” career development awards for Penn faculty.