Dr. Avraham Cooper ’03 knows an extraordinary amount about how the human body works. He’s also passionate about figuring out how to explain it to the rest of us.
A practicing pulmonary and critical care physician at The Ohio State University, Dr. Cooper also trains future specialists, and his writing has appeared in The New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, and CHEST. Most recently, he explored the body’s hidden pathways in a feature for The New York Times Magazine. But medicine tells only part of his story.
Dr. Cooper is something of a modern-day Renaissance man. An English literature major at Yeshiva University before attending medical school at Harvard, he had long been drawn to both science and the humanities. How they might come together was less clear. “I felt like I could put these things together, but I didn’t know how,” he said.
Gann helped shape the way Dr. Cooper learned to pursue those varied interests. He remembers moving among very different kinds of learning, particularly in his Jewish studies classes. “That was really important for me developmentally, in terms of flexibility of mind,” he said. He remembers English teacher Ed Codish in particular. “He taught me how to read,” Dr. Cooper said. Years before he would begin writing for audiences of his own, Codish helped shape the way he approached the written word. He also remembers environmental science as an opportunity to pursue scientific questions in a more open-ended way.
Medicine eventually gave Dr. Cooper a way to bring those interests together. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he was busy caring for patients and studying a frightening new disease. But even amid the seriousness of that moment, there was room for curiosity. Lockdown gave him unexpected time for something creative, and in 2020, he co-founded The Curious Clinicians, a podcast devoted to the kinds of questions about the human body that had long fascinated him.
That same curiosity is at the heart of his forthcoming book, Why Doesn’t Your Stomach Digest Itself?, co-written with physician Dr. Tony Breu, which explores everything from everyday mysteries of the human body to the extremes of what it can endure.
For Dr. Cooper, that curiosity is grounded in a genuine sense of wonder. “I’m pretty awed by the body,” he said. More than 20 years after Gann, he is still bringing together science and humanities, expertise and curiosity, learning and teaching, and inviting the rest of us along with him.
Dr. Cooper will return to Gann in early 2027 as part of his book tour, sharing his experiences in medicine, education, and writing with current students.