Jodi Halpern

Jodi Halpern MD, PhD is Endowed Chair and Professor of Bioethics at UC Berkeley and the co-founder of the Berkeley Group on the Ethics and Regulation of Innovative Technologies. She graduated from Yale University with an MD and a Ph.D. in Philosophy for which 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. For example, she shows how gaps in the most recent national and international guidelines on genome editing leave open the possibility of a new kind of intergenerational injustice in which wealth determines the genetic health profiles of some families over others. 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.

She is invited to present her work internationally, including at the 2018, 2019 and 2020 meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.