Rachel Kohn

Dr. Rachel Kohn is an Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Division of Pulmonary, Allergy and Critical Care, and Core Faculty at the PAIR Center. She is a pulmonologist and intensivist at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania and Penn Presbyterian Medical Center.

Dr. Kohn’s research intersects health services research and healthcare delivery equity, particularly surrounding inpatient care delivery and representativeness in prospective research. In collaboration with Kaiser Permanente Northern California and MedStar Health, Dr. Kohn was awarded an NHLBI/NIH R01 to develop, validate, and demonstrate the impact of a novel in-hospital mortality prediction model that performs as well as commonly used models, but that performs more equitably across sociodemographic characteristics. She is also PI of one of three projects of an American Heart Association Strategically Focused Research Network Grant evaluating the science of diversity in clinical trials titled, Behavioral Economics to Transform Trial Enrollment Representativeness (BETTER) Center. Additionally, she is evaluating the novel long-term survivorship construct of dignity among survivors of acute respiratory failure.

Dr. Kohn is a founding member of the Joint Research Practices Working Group (JRP), a collaboration between the PAIR Center and Penn’s Center for Health Incentives and Behavioral Economics (CHIBE) to develop and disseminate best practices and guidelines for the conduct of inclusive and accessible research, created in 2021. In 2025, the JRP received the University of Pennsylvania Models of Excellence Award celebrating extraordinary achievements of staff across the University. Dr. Kohn was selected as an American Thoracic Society Fellow in 2025, she received the Society of Critical Care Medicine Presidential Citation in 2022 and 2023, she was awarded the Donald B. Martin Department of Medicine Teaching Service Award in 2020, and she received the Holmes Award for best abstract by an early career faculty member engaged in clinical research in the University of Pennsylvania Department of Medicine in 2019. Her mentees have received numerous awards for work performed under her mentorship.

After graduating from undergraduate and medical school at the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Kohn completed her Internal Medicine residency at Massachusetts General Hospital, and fellowship in Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. During fellowship, she completed a Master of Science in Clinical Epidemiology.