Theodore “Jack” Iwashyna is Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Social Science and Justice in Medicine at Johns Hopkins. He has primary appointments in both Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine in the School of Medicine and Health Policy & Management in the Bloomberg School of Public Health; he also has a courtesy appointment in the Carey Business School.
Iwashyna did his undergraduate in Molecular Biology at Princeton, and an MD / PhD with a PhD in Public Policy at the University of Chicago’s MSTP. He did internal medicine residency and fellowship at Penn; he moved to the University of Michigan in 2008 as an Assistant Professor through the Alpheus Tucker Professorship. He was recruited to Johns Hopkins in 2022. Throughout this time, including the pandemic, he has maintained an active academic practice in medical ICUs.
Jack’s scholarship is known for 3 major intellectual contributions. The first is reframing the effects of sepsis and severe infection from being life-threatening to also life-altering. The second is the work on racial bias in medical devices which he will be talking about with us today. The third—and most cherished by him—is as a mentor of clinician-scientists and other scholars dedicated to improving health in a range of fields, professions, and specialties. His current research and teaching are rooted in the unifying hypotheses that dramatic improvements in outcomes can be achieved by linking nuanced measurements of individual physiology with sophisticated understandings of organizational environments shaping care choices and institutional effectiveness.