Today, the Perelman School of Medicine is a major center of biomedical research and education with over 2,900 faculty members and nearly $1 billion in annual sponsored program awards.

By sending these abroad duly qualified, or by exciting an emulation amongst men of parts and literature, it may give birth to other useful institutions of a similar nature, or occasional rise, by its example to numerous societies of different kinds, calculated to spread the light of knowledge through the whole American continent, wherever inhabited".

[7] The School of Medicine's early faculty included nationally prominent physicians, surgeons, and scientists such as Benjamin Rush, Philip Syng Physick, William Shippen Jr.,[8] and Robert Hare.

In addition to being a Penn professor of chemistry, medical theory, and clinical practice, Dr. Benjamin Rush served as a key figure in the American Revolution as a Founding Father, signatory to the United States Declaration of Independence, and member of the Continental Congress.

[9] In the mid-19th century, notable faculty members included William Pepper, Joseph Leidy, and Nathaniel Chapman (founding president of the American Medical Association).

[10] William Osler and Howard Atwood Kelly, two of the "founding four" physicians of Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore were drawn from Penn's medical faculty.

[18][19][20] During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the School of Medicine was one of the earliest to encourage the development of the emerging medical specialties: neurosurgery, ophthalmology, dermatology, and radiology.

[24] In the 1990s and 2000s, Paul Offit, a professor of pediatrics at the School of Medicine and Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, lead the scientific advances behind the modern RotaTeq vaccine for infectious childhood diarrhea.

[25] In 2006, Dr. Kaplan and Shore of the Department of Orthopedics discovered the causative mutation in fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva, an extremely rare disease of bone.

Kevin B. Mahoney is CEO of UPHS[33][34] while J. Larry Jameson is Dean of Medicine and Executive Vice President of the health system.