Lee A. Fleisher, MD Professorship of Anesthesiology and Critical Care
Created in 2016 by the Department of Anesthesiology and Critical Care, the Professorship honors former Department Chair Lee A. Fleisher, MD, to reflect the longtime impact Dr. Fleisher’s leadership has brought to Penn Medicine during his tenure. Dr. Fleisher is currently Chief Medical Officer for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). He also serves as Director of the Center for Clinical Standards and Quality, which serves as the focal point for all quality, clinical, medical science issues, survey and certification, and policies for CMS programs.
Dr. Fleisher continues to maintain a clinical role at Penn Medicine and as a faculty member while serving in this important federal position. A national health policy thought leader whose work has focused on evidence-based medicine, defining quality metrics, and the influence of culture and innovation on care delivery, Dr. Fleisher will bring a wealth of deep expertise to his new role to benefit the 140 million Americans who rely on Medicare and Medicaid for health coverage. He is a model collaborator, and his experience working closely with experts from diverse fields including law, business, nursing, and anthropology and sociology will ensure representation of all stakeholders in shaping CMS plans and policy.
Dr. Fleisher’s impact since becoming chair in 2004 has brought about transformational change within the Department and across the health system, from training, professionalism and well-being efforts for of physicians at all levels to mapping innovative clinical care initiatives. His leading role in important strategic initiatives, such as quality, patient safety, and managed care have been invaluable, as have his contributions to the Opioid Task Force, the development of the ERAS Collaborative, and our global health project in Vietnam.
Dr. Fleisher is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine, and has held numerous national leadership roles, including serving on the Board of Directors and chairing the Consensus Standards Advisory Committee, and serving as co-chair of the Surgery Standing Committee of the National Quality Forum. He has served on numerous Technical Expert Panels for CMS, and the Yale Center for Outcomes Research and Evaluation. He is also a member of the Medical Advisory Panel of the Technology Evaluation Center of the Blue Cross/Blue Shield Association.
Additionally, Dr. Fleisher’s exceptional work leading the department during the difficult and uncertain times that have marked the COVID-19 pandemic have served as a capstone to his nearly seventeen years of outstanding leadership service that has cemented an unmatched national reputation for Penn Medicine and the Department of Anesthesiology and Critical Care.
Current Chairholder:
Max B. Kelz, MD, PhD
Max Kelz, MD, PhD is a practicing neuroanesthesiologist who currently serves as the Vice Chair of Research in Anesthesiology and Critical Care at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the Founding Director of Penn’s Center for the Neuroscience of Unconsciousness and Reanimation Research Alliance (NEURRAL). He remains actively involved in the University’s education and mentoring missions and is a member of Penn’s MSTP (Medical Scientist Training Program) Steering Committee and Program Advisor.
Dr. Kelz did his undergraduate training in molecular biophysics and biochemistry at Yale University and then completed his MD and PhD in neuroscience, also at Yale. Upon graduating, he joined the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of Anesthesiology and Critical Care for residency training. As a resident, Dr. Kelz was inspired by a case of delayed emergence in which a narcoleptic patient took more than six hours to regain consciousness after an anesthetic whose known actions dissipated in minutes. He began to question where and how general anesthetics exert their hypnotic effects. In the process, Dr. Kelz became one of the first to question the notion that exit from the anesthetic state is a passive, mechanistic mirror image of anesthetic induction. He discovered that dysfunction in orexin/hypocretin signaling, which causes narcolepsy, can asymmetrically impair the exit from states of anesthesia without altering anesthetic induction. This breakthrough, along with his others in zebrafish, fruit flies, mice, and humans, conclusively demonstrates that the brain harbors intrinsic mechanisms to track whether it is awake or unconscious. Moreover, the brain exhibits an inertial-like resistance to changes in its arousal state. Dr. Kelz has demonstrated that such basic mechanisms leading to hysteresis are highly conserved across invertebrates and mammals, and have implications for return of cognition in humans exiting states of general anesthesia.
Dr. Kelz received the first of his continuous 20-year string of federal and foundation grant funding as a resident at Penn. He joined the tenure-track faculty at the University of Pennsylvania in 2004, straight out of residency. In 2014, he became the inaugural recipient of the David E. Longnecker Associate Professorship of Anesthesiology and Critical Care. In 2018, he was promoted to full professor and received the Distinguished Professorship of Anesthesiology. He has published over 100 peer-reviewed manuscripts and is presently funded as the Principal Investigator of two NIH R01 grants while also directing a T32 grant.