Jeffrey Borkan, MD, PhD

Jeffrey M. Borkan, MD, PhD joined the Department of Family Medicine at Brown University as Professor and Chair in 2001. He is a family physician researcher, educator, clinician, and advocate whose career has bridged two fields (family medicine and medical anthropology), both in the US and abroad. Dr. Borkan received his BA from the University of Michigan and his MD and PhD at Case Western Reserve University. He completed his residency at the University of Washington and was a fellow in Social Medicine at Harvard. Prior to arriving at Brown, he was on the faculty at the University of Massachusetts, Ben-Gurion, and Tel Aviv, and a Visiting Professor at the University of Washington and Harvard Medical School. For six years, he was the Coordinator of a national practice based research network (PBRN) and served as the Director of Research in a family medicine department for a decade. Concurrently, he managed the medical services of an isolated desert region in southern Israel, later joining a model teaching practice in the Galilee. He came to Brown after having been the Vice Chair of Behavioral Science at Tel Aviv University, helping coordinate a humanistic curriculum reform there. At Brown, Dr. Borkan has worked to further develop the Department of Family Medicine, has been active in Rhode Island health policy, and in education at the Medical School, where he currently Chairs the MD Curriculum Committee and the Sub-Committee on Scholarly Concentrations.