Dr. Rohan Jotwani, the Nanette Laitman Education Scholar in Entrepreneurship and an assistant professor of clinical anesthesiology at Weill Cornell Medicine, has been selected for the prestigious Macy Faculty Scholars Program.
One of five educators nationwide to make up the class of 2026, Dr. Jotwani becomes Weill Cornell Medicine’s first-ever Macy Faculty Scholar, and the first anesthesiologist ever to receive this award. The two-year program, led by the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation, aims to identify and nurture promising early-career educators and future leaders in medicine and nursing—providing support to pursue a mentored education project, as well as professional development activities.
Dr. Rohan Jotwani
A renowned expert and researcher in the field of medical extended reality, Dr. Jotwani’s project will focus on developing and scaling an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered extended reality interactive learning platform that uses a three-dimensional Conversational Agent Learning Ethics Bot (CALEB) for medical ethics training.
For several years, Dr. Jotwani has been collaborating with a skilled team at Weill Cornell to incubate CALEB as a learning platform for medical professionals in core ethical competencies.
“Being named a Macy Faculty Scholar is an incredible honor,” said Dr. Jotwani, who is also co-director of the Extended Reality Anesthesiology Immersion Lab at Weill Cornell and the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Medical Extended Reality. “It’s an opportunity to connect with leaders in medical education and bring what we've been doing with CALEB at Weill Cornell to medical schools across the country and the world.”
The dialectic AI tool, which serves as an instructional ally for real-life medical ethics cases, is trained by medical educators for medical education with built-in guardrails to guide user interactions.
“It’s a model that shows us we can control how we bring AI technology to our medical schools in a safe and responsible way,” Dr. Jotwani said. On the password-protected interface, medical students, residents and fellows can talk directly to CALEB, which appears as a human-like holographic avatar, and ask medical ethics questions to practice and reflect on, such as: When caring for a patient who is critically ill in the ICU, how do I reconcile differences between what the patient would want and what the family is asking for?
“CALEB won’t think for users, but it is designed to push the limits of their thinking on a case, to help make them better clinicians,” Dr. Jotwani said. “With the help of the Macy Faculty Scholar Award, I’m excited to bring this functional tool to the classroom and across diverse learning environments.”
