Physician, educator, writer

Avraham (Avi) Z. Cooper, MD is a pulmonary/critical care physician and Assistant Professor of Medicine at The Ohio State University in Columbus, OH. He was born in Atlanta, GA and moved to Boston, MA before studying English literature at Yeshiva University in New York City. He returned to Boston for medical school at Harvard and internal medicine residency at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, where he developed a deep passion for medical education. After completing a pulmonary/critical care medicine fellowship at Ohio State, he joined the faculty as Program Director of the fellowship and continues to teach, write, and care for patients.

He has won multiple awards for teaching and humanism at Harvard and Ohio State, and he is an inductee of the Gold Humanism Honor Society. Avi’s poetry and essays about end of life decision making, novel educational methods, and narrative medicine have been featured in The New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, Journal of General Internal Medicine, Chest, and Journal of Graduate Medical Education, among others.

Avi believes strongly in the power of technology to flatten hierarchies in medicine and help teach medical learners across the world. In 2019 he began posting educational threads (“tweetorials”) on Twitter about curiosity questions in medicine, which since then have in total reached over 10 million people across the world. In 2020, along with his cohosts Hannah Abrams, MD and Anthony (Tony) Breu, MD, he co-founded The Curious Clinicians, a Medical Podcast that asks “Why?”. Avi, Hannah, and Tony explore wide-ranging questions in medicine - from the source of the Thanksgiving food coma to why fevers are beneficial in infection. He views the podcast as an extension of both his love for teaching and passion for novel ways to educate others in healthcare.

Avi is the co-author, along with Tony Breu, of the forthcoming book “WHY DOESN”T YOUR STOMACH DIGEST ITSELF?” (W.W. Norton), an exploration of the remarkable resilience of the human body.

He is represented by Kristin van Ogtrop (Inkwell Management).