Brandeis Alumni, Family and Friends

NFL team owner, documentary film producer, and philanthropist draws motivation from family

April 14, 2026

Jeffrey Lurie, Heller PhD’87, receives 2026 Alumni Achievement Award

Jeffrey Lurie, Heller PhD’87, is a man of many passions. Sports. Movies. Philanthropy. In some way, each of these passions connects to his family — and, in numerous ways, they’ve been motivators behind his remarkable accomplishments.

Lurie traces his love of sports back to his father, who passed away when Lurie was nine years old. Now as chairman and CEO of the Philadelphia Eagles, Lurie has led the professional football team to 12 division titles, four trips to the Super Bowl, and two World Championships.

Lurie’s zeal for watching and making movies links back to his grandfather, who founded General Cinema, once a major theater chain with locations across the country. Over the years, Lurie has produced numerous films, including three award-winning documentaries.

Lurie credits his desire to give back to the lessons and examples of his parents. His brother has autism, and solving the riddle of this puzzling developmental disability has been a major driver behind his philanthropy. In 2018, for instance, Lurie started the Eagle Autism Foundation. Then in 2025, he and his family launched the Lurie Autism Institute in partnership with Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and Penn Medicine.

In recognition of these accomplishments, Brandeis has awarded Lurie with a 2026 Alumni Achievement Award, given to distinguished alumni for outstanding contributions in their fields and to society more broadly. This year’s winners also include Loretta Devine, MFA’76, Broadway, film, and television actor, and Sheila Efron Taube, PhD, ’63, P’89, a pioneer in cancer research.

Even though sports and movies have always been a huge part of Lurie’s life, he chose to study psychology as an undergraduate at Clark University and then social policy when he came to Brandeis for his PhD. “I love thinking about personality and human behavior — even when I was in high school. But I never had the chance to really study them,” he said. “It just felt more like real life. Understand people. Understand yourself. It just rang true.”

He chose Brandeis because it offered one of the few programs that took an interdisciplinary approach to the subject and looked at human needs on a global scale. “I wanted to understand from a needs basis where one could make an impact in the world, and what was happening around the world in terms of health, education, socioeconomic issues, virtually anything,” Lurie said. “What kind of policies would be beneficial to satisfy human needs in societies? And how can we study them? Heller was one of the very few schools offering that perspective.”

His advisor, the late professor David Gil, made a lasting impact on Lurie. “He thought differently than others. I really respected his humanitarian approach to social problems and social policy,” Lurie said.

The ability to think critically and analyze problems, as well as focus on the basic human needs in a society, are major takeaways for Lurie from his time at Brandeis. “What are the policies that could improve people’s lives? What are the functions of institutions to try to help those needs, as opposed to hindering or blocking them? This way of thinking influences everything,” he said.

In fact, Lurie relied on this type of thinking when developing and launching the Lurie Autism Institute. “Our analysis concluded that investing in Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and Penn as an epicenter of research would attract a lot more capital and innovative research,” he said. “We support innovative research, because those discoveries are really the backbone of where you can globally improve the lives of those who have autism. That’s the effort and that’s the hope. It’s a good example of recognizing a human need, doing a critical analysis, and taking a global perspective. Those are all qualities that I further developed at the Heller School.”

These qualities and the ability to understand and empathize with others play out in all aspects of Lurie’s life. His production company Play/Action Pictures, for example, focuses on documentaries. Lurie admires this format because it allows for the expression of social and political views, serving as a forum to discuss human needs. Three documentaries Lurie executive produced won Academy Awards: “Inside Job” (2010), “Inocente” (2012), and “Summer of Soul” (2021).

“I love filmmaking to begin with, and documentaries are a way to connect social policy and my own thinking with those of filmmakers. So it’s a great forum to express a lot of things,” he said. “I also get to help filmmakers bring their wonderful visions to life, and I get to support an area that I know something about. It still intrigues me.”

Lurie endeavors to manage his football franchise in accordance with his values as well. He considers his ability to understand and empathize with people one of the “secret sauces” to running the Eagles.

“One of the real joys I have of running a football team is seeing the collaboration between people of very different backgrounds — racial, socio-economic, ethnic. It’s amazing to see it,” he said. “You read about all the polarization in society. But what we have is a sort of real-life extended family working together in wonderful ways.”

Read about past Alumni Achievement Award winners.