Jordan Cohen, M.D., president emeritus of the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) and chairman emeritus of the board of the Arnold P. Gold Foundation for Humanism in Medicine, will be honored during the University of Nebraska Medical Center’s Dec. 20 commencement ceremony for his significant contributions to health care. The ceremony will be held at 2 p.m. in the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha.
UNMC will present Dr. Cohen an Honorary Doctor of Health Sciences degree for distinguished achievement in the advancement of health care throughout the country.
Dr. Cohen served as AAMC’s president and CEO from 1994-2006. Founded in 1876, the AAMC represents all 171 accredited U.S. and Canadian medical schools, nearly 400 major teaching hospitals, 80 academic and research societies, and more than 218,000 U.S. medical students and residents.
Prior to his leadership of the AAMC, he served as dean of the medical school and professor of medicine at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and as president of the medical staff at University Hospital. Dr. Cohen also served previously as professor and associate chair of medicine at the University of Chicago-Pritzker School of Medicine, and physician-in-chief and chair of the Department of Medicine at the Michael Reese Hospital and Medical Center in Chicago.
From 2006 to 2012, he was professor of medicine and public health at George Washington University, and he has held faculty positions at Harvard, Brown, and Tufts universities.
Dr. Cohen is a member of the National Academy of Medicine. He currently serves on the Advisory Board of the Bucksbaum Institute for Clinical Excellence at the University of Chicago, and on the visiting committees of Harvard Medical School and the University of Chicago-Pritzker School of Medicine.
He has served as chair of the American Board of Internal Medicine and as vice chair of the Board of Regents of the American College of Physicians. He also has been a board member of the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation of New York, the National Library of Medicine, the China Medical Board, the Morehouse School of Medicine, and the Qatar Foundation for Education, Science & Community Development.
Dr. Cohen is a graduate of Yale University and Harvard Medical School and completed his postgraduate training in internal medicine on the Harvard service at the Boston City Hospital. He also completed a fellowship in nephrology at the Tufts-New England Medical Center. He has authored more than 130 publications and is a former editor of Kidney International’s “Nephrology Forum.”