Aasim I. Padela, MD, MSc, FACEP

Dr. Padela is an emergency medicine physician and an academic scholar with research foci at the intersection of bioethics, public health, and religion. Overall, his scholarship aims to advance health equity and societal well-being through multidisciplinary inquiry and multilevel intervention. Accordingly, Dr. Padela’s expertise spans a variety of research methodologies and topics, including community-engaged, patient-centered, and human-centered research design, behavior change theory, religiously tailored and faith-based messaging, survey and qualitative research, discourse analysis, character education, clinical ethics, and Islamic theology.

Over his career, Dr. Padela’s noteworthy scholarly contributions include (i) developing novel mosque-based approaches and tools for studying and intervening upon Muslim American health disparities, these innovations include techniques for mosque-based PCOR and tailored faith-based messaging, as well as measures of religious fatalism, modesty, religious knowledge of organ donation and end-of-life care; (ii) launching national studies of the prevalence, as well as professional and psychological impacts of, religious discrimination and accommodation experienced by Muslim clinicians in the United States and the United Kingdom; and (iii) conceptual, discursive, and research frameworks for bridging biomedical, social scientific, and religious knowledge in global bioethics and policy deliberation. This work has spanned behaviors related to cancer screening, organ donation, end-of-life care, and discourse between religion and science, and has been supported by diverse sources, including the Health Research and Services Administration, Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute, the John Templeton Foundation, the Greenwall Foundation, the Qatar National Research Fund, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Within the academy, Dr. Padela has held a variety of administrative, programmatic, research, and educational leadership posts across university settings, aligning institutional needs with his diverse background and skills. Presently, he is Vice Chair for Research and Scholarship in the Department of Emergency Medicine at the Medical College of Wisconsin (MCW). At MCW he also serves as a Learning Community Navigator in the newly launched MCWFusion medical education curriculum. Outside of the academy, he provides public health and bioethics consultation to international organizations, legislative bodies, and in court. His work has been featured in major news outlets, including the New York Times, USA Today, Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, National Public Radio, Newsweek, and CNN.

Dr. Padela holds an MD from Weill Cornell Medical College and an MSc in Healthcare Research from the University of Michigan. He also holds a BS in Biomedical Engineering and a BA in Classical Arabic from the University of Rochester. He completed emergency medicine training at the University of Rochester, a research fellowship at the University of Michigan, a clinical medical ethics fellowship at the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics at the University of Chicago and visiting fellowships at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies and the International Institute for Islamic Thought. He has authored over 150 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters and one monograph Maqasid al-Shariah and Biomedicine: Bridging Moral, Ethical and Policy Discourses (IIIT Press 2024). He is also editor/co-editor of four books Medicine and Shariah: A Dialogue in Islamic Bioethics (UND Press 2021), Islam and Biomedicine (Springer 2022), Organ Donation in Islam: The Interplay of Jurisprudence, Ethics and Society (Lexington Books 2022) and Islam, Muslims, and COVID-19: The Intersection of Ethics, Health, and Social Life in the Diaspora (Brill 2024).

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