Rachel Kowalsky ’97, is a pediatric emergency medicine physician and Pushcart-nominated fiction writer and essayist. She is Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine and Pediatrics at Weill Cornell Medicine, where she is the Lead for the Weill Cornell Medicine Health Humanities Curriculum, Site Director for the New York-Presbyterian Emergency Medicine Residency’s Academic Practice Track in the Humanities, and Faculty Advisor for Hummingbird, the student-run journal of the health humanities.
Her fiction and essays can be found in The Missouri Review, The Intima, Atticus Review, and anthologies such as Real Life of a Pediatrician, Ed. Perri Klass, and the forthcoming Where It Hurts, Ed. Donna Bulseco. Her academic writing can be found in the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA Pediatrics, and the American Journal of Bioethics, as well as the textbooks Medical Professionalism: Theory, Education, and Practice (Oxford University Press) and the forthcoming Music, Medicine, and the Neurobiology of Creativity (Cambridge University Press).
She has been interviewed on The Nocturnist, CBC Radio, and KevinMD, read from her work at the 92nd Street Y, The Hudson Valley Writers Center, and the Airway Storytelling Collective, and spoken nationally on topics in the health humanities, including at the American Academy of Pediatrics, the US Food and Drug Administration, the Patient Advocate Foundation, and the Association of Writers and Writing Programs. She graduated from Brown University in 1997 with a concentration in comparative literature, obtained her MD and MPH from Tufts University School of Medicine, completed a residency in pediatrics at Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital of New York Presbyterian and Fellowship in Pediatric Emergency Medicine at NYU Langone. Her published stories and essays can be found at rachelkowalskymd.com.
