Jerry Avorn
Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School
Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Department of Medicine
Jerry Avorn, M.D., is a Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and a senior internist in the Mass General Brigham health-care system. He did his undergraduate work at Columbia University during the tumultuous sixties; on graduation he was the principal author of Up Against the Ivy Wall: A History of the Columbia Crisis, published by Atheneum in 1969.
Despite that, he attended Harvard Medical School and completed his residency in internal medicine at its teaching hospitals. He went on to build a research group at Harvard, the Division of Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacoeconomics or DoPE, comprising faculty from the fields of medicine, epidemiology, law, policy, and ethics; it was among the first to use health care utilization data to study patterns of drug prescribing, adherence, outcomes, costs, and adverse events. In DoPE, he co-founded and co-directs the Program On Regulation, Therapeutics, And Law (PORTAL), one of the nation’s largest groups studying medication policy. To improve front-line prescribing, he developed an educational outreach approach known as academic detailing to “market” the best evidence about prescription drugs to clinicians, free of any commercial sponsorship. A non-profit organization he founded, Alosa Health, offers doctors non-commercial, evidence-based information about optimal prescribing choices. (It’s named after a genus of fish that swim upstream.)
One of the nation’s most highly cited researchers, Jerry has written or cowritten over 600 papers in the medical literature as well as commentaries in JAMA, The New England Journal of Medicine, TheNew York Times, and TheWashington Post. He is the author of Powerful Medicines: The Benefits, Risks, and Costs of Prescription Drugs(Knopf, 2004) and, most recently, Rethinking Medications: Truth, Power, and the Drugs You Take(Simon & Schuster, 2025).
He is married to Karen Tucker and lives in Brookline.
PERSONAL WEBSITES:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jerry-avorn/