Fellow Highlights

Paul & Daisy Soros Fellow Dov Fox Named 2026 Guggenheim Fellow

April 27, 2026

The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has named Dov Fox, a 2007 Paul & Daisy Soros Fellow, among its 2026 class of Guggenheim Fellows—one of 223 distinguished individuals selected from nearly 5,000 applicants across 55 disciplines. The honor recognizes both prior career achievement and exceptional promise for future work.

Dov will use the Guggenheim Fellowship to create a long-form documentary examining pressing challenges in end-of-life care—its purposes, boundaries, and criminalization. The project explores how we think about a good death and a bad one, in law and in life, through the lens of legal conflicts amid the opioid crisis and its crackdown.

“I’m honored to join the Guggenheim community of scholars and creators across every field and art form,” Dov explained. “And grateful for the chance the award will provide to try and address our culture of silence about death and dying.”

Dov is Herzog Endowed Scholar and professor of law at the University of San Diego School of Law, where he directs the Center for Health Law Policy & Bioethics. His scholarship spans the intersection of law, medicine, and bioethics, appearing in leading journals including the Harvard Law Review, Yale Law Journal, New England Journal of Medicine, and JAMA, as well as in public commentary for The New York Times, The Economist, and CNN.

His recent books—The Conscience of Care: Navigating Health in the Culture Wars (Harvard University Press) and Birth Rights and Wrongs: How Medicine and Technology are Remaking Reproduction and the Law (Oxford University Press)—bring rigorous legal and ethical analysis to urgent questions in health and science. His Audible Original Donor 9623 was named the platform’s #1 podcast and submitted for a Pulitzer Prize in investigative journalism.

Born in Rehovot, Israel, Dov grew up speaking Hebrew and Arabic before making his way to the United States—where the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship would later support his legal education at Yale Law School. There, he served as projects editor of the Yale Law Journal and was awarded the prize for best paper in law and science all three years. He also holds a doctorate in political theory from Oxford University, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar.