Operations Team

Over his career, Dr. Padela’s noteworthy scholarly contributions include:

(i) Developing novel mosque-based approaches and tools for studying and intervening upon Muslim American health disparities, these innovations include techniques for mosque PCOR, tailored faith based messaging, and measures of religious fatalism, modesty, religious knowledge of organ donation and end-of-life care;

(ii) Launching national studies of the prevalence, as well as professional and psychological impacts of, religious discrimination and accommodation experienced by Muslim clinicians in the United States and United Kingdom; and

(iii) Conceptual, discursive, and research frameworks for bridging biomedical, social scientific, and religious knowledge in global bioethics and policy deliberation. This work has spanned behaviors related to cancer screening, organ donation, end-of-life care, and the intersection of religion and science, and has been supported by diverse sources, including the Health Research and Services Administration, Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute, the John Templeton Foundation, the Greenwall Foundation, the Qatar National Research Fund, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Dr. Padela has held a range of administrative, programmatic, research, and educational leadership roles across university settings. Currently, he is Director of Strategic Global Engagement and Director of the RAPID-EM Research Fellowship in the Department of Emergency Medicine at the Medical College of Wisconsin (MCW). From 2020-26, he served as inaugural Vice Chair for Research and Scholarship in the Department of Emergency Medicine. At MCW, he also serves as a Learning Community Navigator, providing professional coaching and ethics tutoring to 16 medical students throughout their four years. Before joining MCW, he served as Director of the Program on Medicine and Religion at the University of Chicago (UC), a cross-cutting research, teaching, and convening program spanning the medical school, divinity school, and ethics center, and as Director of Faculty Development in the Section of Emergency Medicine.

Dr. Padela holds an MD from Weill Cornell Medical College and an MSc in Healthcare Research from the University of Michigan. He is completing an MA in Character Education at the University of Birmingham. He also holds a BS in Biomedical Engineering and a BA in Classical Arabic from the University of Rochester. He completed emergency medicine training at the University of Rochester, a research fellowship at the University of Michigan, a clinical medical ethics fellowship at the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics, and visiting fellowships at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies and the International Institute for Islamic Thought. 

He has authored over 170 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters; edited or co-edited 7 books; Medicine and Shariah: A Dialogue in Islamic Bioethics (UND Press, 2021), Islam and Biomedicine (Springer, 2022), Organ Donation in Islam: The Interplay of Jurisprudence, Ethics and Society (Lexington, 2022), Islam, Muslims, and COVID-19: The Intersection of Ethics, Health, and Social Life in the Diaspora (Brill, 2024), Bridging Bioscience and Islam: Engaging Big Questions about the Human Being (Palgrave MacMillan, 2026), and a monograph, Maqasid al-Shariah and Biomedicine: Bridging Moral, Ethical and Policy Discourses (IIIT Press, 2025). 

His work has been featured in major news outlets, including the New York Times, USA Today, Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, National Public Radio, Newsweek, and CNN, and he is host of an award-winning international podcast series, Big Questions about the Human Being: Bioscience & Islam in Dialogue.