Jay Baruch is a writer, emergency room doctor, educator, and Professor of Emergency Medicine at Alpert Medical School of Brown University, where he serves as the Director of the Medical Humanities and Bioethics Scholarly Concentration. His academic and creative work centers on the complexity and uncertainty in patient care and the importance of creativity, interdisciplinarity, and the arts as clinical skills. His latest book of non-fiction essays is Tornado of Life: A Doctor’s Journey through Constraints and Creativity in the Emergency Room (MIT Press 2022). He’s the author of two short fiction collections: What’s Left Out (Kent State University Press 2015) and Fourteen Stories: Doctors, Patients, and Other Strangers (Kent State University Press 2007).

He’s a former Director-at-Large, American Society for Bioethics and Humanities and the former medical humanities section chair for the American College of Emergency Physicians. In addition, he’s a former faculty fellow at the Cogut Institute for the Humanities at Brown University, where he directed the Creative Medicine Series and served on the leadership team for the Rhode Island Arts and Health group on practice, policy, and research.

His projects range from work with the Rhode Island School of Design Museum educators on museum-based curriculum to get clinicians to think about how they think, creating authentic spaces for fostering difficult conversations with the RISD Center for Complexity, and a Brown University EdX online course, “Beyond Medical Histories: Gaining Insight from Patient Stories.”

He serves on the steering committee for the Health Humanities Consortium and the AMA Journal of Ethics editorial board and received the inaugural Society for Academic Emergency Medicine Gold Humanism Award and the Brown Emergency Medicine Innovations in Education Award.