Jodi Halpern

Jodi Halpern MD, PhD holds a University Chair and is Professor of Bioethics at UC Berkeley and the co-founder of the Berkeley Group on the Ethics and Regulation of Innovative Technologies. She is a psychiatrist, and received her MD and Ph.D. in Philosophy from Yale University, where she received the Porter Prize for Outstanding Dissertation across all disciplines. Halpern’s research brings together psychiatry, philosophy, behavioral economics and decision neuroscience to examine how innovative technologies such as gene editing and artificial intelligence transform relationships and society in unexpected ways. Halpern’s first book, From Detached Concern to Empathy: Humanizing Medical Practice was called a “seminal work” by leading medical journals and helped transform medical education. She is completing her second book entitled Remaking the Self in the Wake of Illness, and has started on her third book Engineering Empathy. Halpern has written over fifty influential scholarly articles and made important contributions to bioethics policy. Some recent contributions include delineating a pathway to protect and respect human participants in early, highly innovative research and identifying the role of rights assessments in protecting society from the intergenerational injustices that could follow if germline gene editing were adopted. She is a recipient of numerous fellowships including the Greenwall Faculty Scholars Fellowship and the Rockefeller Fellowship at Princeton University’s Center for Human Values, and the lifetime achievement Fellowship of the Hastings Center. Halpern is invited to present her work internationally, including at the 2018, 2019 and 2020 meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.