Steering Committee

Dr. Rachel C. Conrad
Biography
During undergraduate, Dr. Conrad studied health and societies, an interdisciplinary approach to understanding human health and disease, which integrates sociological, anthropological, and epidemiological perspectives. Between undergraduate and medical school, Dr. Conrad worked as a healthcare strategy consultant at Bain & Company to see a different angle on the barriers to medical care and to learn about the US healthcare industry and drivers of innovative models of care.
Dr. Conrad attended medical school at Baylor College of Medicine, where she founded the Finding Meaning in Medicine program and completed the Medical Ethics program at the Baylor College of Medicine Center for Medical Ethics and Health Policy. While training in Adult Psychiatry at Emory University School of Medicine, she developed a peer-support program for psychiatry residents and studied residents’ distressing experiences with patient death. She was the outpatient chief fellow at Boston Children’s Hospital during her fellowship in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and completed a fellowship in Bioethics at the Harvard Medical School Center for Bioethics.
After graduating from medical training, Dr. Conrad started a leadership position at Brigham and Women’s Hospital where she launched Young Adult Mental Health. This program supports patients while they transition from pediatric to adult treatment settings and pilots innovative models of care that increase access, improve quality of care, and decrease treatment delays for young adults.
Dr. Conrad is dedicated to teaching, training, mentoring, and supporting both the personal and intellectual growth of students and trainees. She believes that teaching students to sit with ambivalence, navigate complex conversations, and respectfully engage with controversial opinions is foundational to ethical deliberation. She teaches both medical ethics and neuropsychiatric ethics courses across the student educational lifespan, ranging from first-year undergraduate students to PGY-5 psychiatry residents. She is a teaching fellow for Dr. Steve Hyman in the undergraduate neuro-ethics course at Harvard College. She is a founder and co-director of the BWH/ HMS neuro-ethics summer program for undergraduate and medical students. She serves as co-director of the Medical Ethics and Professionalism II course at Harvard Medical School alongside Dr. David Urion and Dr. Ed Hundert. She is a faculty member in the Harvard Medical School Center for Bioethics and teaches medical ethics and neuroethics to residents from PGY-1 to PGY-5.

Dr. Anna Lewis
Biography
Anna Lewis is a bioethicist focused on the ethical, legal, and social implications of genomics. Originally trained in computational biology, and with several years of experience in the genetics industry, she is now focused on research she thinks will have an impact on ensuring advantages in genetics work to the benefit of all. She is currently concentrating on ethical issues surrounding the clinical implementation of polygenic risk scores, and on the way that geneticists conceptualize human global diversity. She has a developing interest in the intersection of neuroethics and genetic ethics. She is based at Harvard’s E L Safra Center for Ethics, and is also affiliated with the Genomes2People Research Program at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. She is a member of numerous national and international ethics advisory and policy-setting groups.

Dr. Rachel Asher
Biography
Rachel Asher, MD, is a 4th year psychiatry resident at Brigham and Women’s Hospital/Harvard Medical School’s psychiatry residency program. She graduated magna cum laude from Northwestern University and AOA from University of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine. Her initial focus on ethics began while working with political asylum-seekers and designing human rights educational curricula inspired by these experiences. This shapes her current interests in the tensions between cultural, religious, and interpersonal factors and widely accepted, Judeo-Christian-derived medical ethical frameworks for patient decision-making. Her academic work in patient mental health factors in minimally invasive spinal neurosurgery continues to inspire her commitment to research on neuroethics of emerging neurotechnologies for neuropsychiatric illness, with a specific focus on including underrepresented voices and community engagement. Dr. Asher is a 2022-2023 fellow at the Harvard Medical School Center for Bioethics and co-founder/co-director of the Brigham and Women’s Hospital/Harvard Medical School Neuroethics Summer Program for undergraduates and medical students. She will be teaching Medical Ethics and Professionalism starting in 2022-2023 at Harvard Medical School.

Dr. Matthew L. Baum
Biography
Matthew L. Baum, M.D., Ph.D., D.Phil. is a resident physician in psychiatry at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston, and a clinical fellow at Harvard Medical School. He holds a B.S. and M.S. in Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology from Yale University; an M.Sc. in Neuroscience from Trinity College, Dublin (funded by a George Mitchell Scholarship); a D.Phil. in Neuroethics from Oxford University (funded by a Rhodes Scholarship); and an M.D. and Ph.D. (in Neuroscience) from Harvard Medical School. He is the author of the book, “The Neuroethics of Biomarkers: What the Development of Bioprediction Means for Moral Responsibility, Justice, and the Nature of Mental Disorder” (Oxford University Press), which was awarded the Carol Davis Ethics prize by the American Psychiatric Association for an “outstanding contribution to literature on the ethics of psychiatry”. He is a past plenary speaker at the annual meeting of the International Neuroethics Society, and has taught medical ethics at Oxford and Harvard. His neuroscientific work has focused on the complement cascade, and its regulation, in a synaptic pruning hypothesis of schizophrenia and he currently aims to integrate scientific, neuroethical, and clinical pursuit of immune-molecule dysfunction in psychiatry.

Dr. Gabriel Lázaro-Muñoz
Biography
Gabriel Lázaro-Muñoz, PhD, JD is Assistant Professor in the Center for Bioethics and the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and the Department of Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital. Dr. Lázaro-Muñoz combines his background in neuroscience, law, and bioethics to examine the implications of emerging biomedical technologies in neuroscience and genomics. He is principal investigator of studies funded by the BRAIN Initiative-National Institutes of Health, the National Institute of Mental Health, and the National Human Genome Research Institute (R01MH114854, RF1MH121371, R01HG011711, R01MH128676). Dr. Lázaro-Muñoz’s current studies examine ethical and social implications of the integration of psychiatric genomics into clinical care, polygenic embryo screening, the development of neurotechnologies such as adaptive deep brain stimulation systems, and the use of deep brain stimulation in children. He is also adjunct professor at the University of Puerto Rico School of Medicine, and Baylor College of Medicine. Dr. Lázaro-Muñoz has been quoted in the LA Times, Scientific American, STAT News, National Public Radio, and MIT Technology Review, among other media outlets. He received his Ph.D. in Neuroscience from New York University; his J.D. and Master of Bioethics from the University of Pennsylvania; and his BA in Psychology from the University of Puerto Rico.

Dr. Francis X. Shen
Biography
Francis X. Shen, JD, PhD is an Associate Professor in the Harvard Medical School Center for Bioethics and the MGH Department of Psychiatry, a University Affiliated Faculty Member at Harvard Law School. Previously Dr. Shen was a Professor of Law, McKnight Presidential Fellow, and faculty member in the Graduate Program in Neuroscience at the University of Minnesota. He is also a faculty member and past Executive Director of the Center for Law, Brain & Behavior (CLBB) at MGH, and serves as the Executive Director of Education and Outreach for the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Law and Neuroscience. In fall 2020 he was a Florence Rogatz Visiting Professor of Law at Yale Law School, where he co-taught Criminal Law with Judge (Ret.) Nancy Gertner. He served as a member of the Neuroethics Subgroup of the National Institutes of Health Advisory Committee to the Director BRAIN Initiative Working Group, and speaks nationally and internationally about the emerging intersection of neuroscience and law.
Dr. Shen directs the Shen Neurolaw Lab, whose Lab motto is, “Every story is a brain story.” He conducts empirical and legal research at the intersection of law, ethics, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence. He has co-authored 3 books, including the first Law and Neuroscience casebook (Aspen), and published articles on a range of neurolaw and neuroethics topics, including the computational phenotyping, portable neuroimaging, memory and lie detection, cognitive enhancement, criminal justice, brain injury, evidentiary admissibility, sports concussion, juror decision-making, criminal mental states, dementia, and mental health. With co-PIs Susan Wolf and Frances Lawrenz at the University of Minnesota and a national working group, Dr. Shen is leading an NIH BRAIN RF1 project on Highly Portable and Cloud-Enabled Neuroimaging Research: Confronting Ethics Challenges in Field Research with New Populations. In 2021, he was awarded the Early Career Scholars Medal by the American Law Institute, one of two medals awarded every other year by the ALI, for being “a pioneer in establishing the interdisciplinary field of law and neuroscience.” He received his B.A. from the University of Chicago, his JD from Harvard Law School, and his PhD from the Harvard Government Department and Harvard Kennedy School Program on Social Policy.
Advisors

Dr. David A. Silbserweig
Biography
Dr. Silbersweig is the Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and Co-Director of the Brigham and Women’s Hospital Center for the Neurosciences. He served as Academic Dean at Harvard Medical School Dean for Partners (Mass General Brigham) HealthCare and is the Stanley Cobb Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.
Dr. David Silbersweig graduated from Dartmouth College with high honors in philosophy. He studied medicine at Cornell University Medical College. He is a neurologist and psychiatrist, having trained in both psychiatry and neurology at The New York Presbyterian Hospital-Weill Cornell Medical Center. His research training was in the emerging field of functional brain imaging research at The Medical Research Council Cyclotron Unit, Hammersmith Hospital, London. Dr. Silbersweig the returned to Cornell to found and direct the Functional Neuroimaging Laboratory with Dr. Emily Stern. Dr. Silbersweig was also the founding Director of the Division of Neuropsychiatry, as well as the founding Director of the Neurology-Psychiatry Combined Residency Program. At Cornell, Dr. Silbersweig was the Tobin-Cooper Professor of Psychiatry, Professor of Neurology and Neurosciences, Professor in the Program in Physiology, Biophysics and Structural Biology, and was Vice Chairman, for Research, in the Department of Psychiatry. He was then recruited to Harvard.
Dr. Silbersweig is one of the pioneers of functional neuroimaging research in psychiatry. He and his colleagues focus upon the development and application of new neuroimaging techniques to localize and characterize brain circuitry dysfunction underlying major psychiatric disorders. They have developed novel methods, paradigms and analytics for both PET and MRI imaging that are widely used, and have identified neural circuitry abnormalities associated with a number of major psychiatric disorders. Particular areas of focus are the characterization of frontal-limbic modulation abnormalities across the neuropsychiatric spectrum, and the identification of final common neural pathways underlying psychiatric clinical phenotypes. Studies combining neuroimaging with therapeutic and biomarker studies, to test mechanistic hypotheses, are ongoing. Dr. Silbersweig and his colleagues have published numerous scientific articles in leading journals, including first reports localizing brain abnormalities associated with hallucinations in schizophrenia, and with tics in Tourette syndrome. They have also made recognized contributions to neural circuit models of depression and borderline personality disorder. The aim of Dr. Silbersweig’s systems-level neuropathophysiology work is to help provide a foundation for the development of novel, targeted, biologically based diagnostic and therapeutic strategies to aid those suffering with mental illness. Dr. Silbersweig has significant involvement (including leadership roles) in national/international research and medical organizations. He is a Fellow of the American Neuropsychiatric Association, and has played a role in shaping the rapidly developing field of neuropsychiatry through his extensive educational activities, his invited presentations in the United States and abroad, and his work with scientific journals, NIH, conferences and organizations. Dr. Silbersweig is also bringing translational neuropsychiatry to broader academic and policy domains through the Harvard Mind Brain Behavior Initiative, and the Boston Global Forum.

Dr. Steven E. Hyman
Biography
Steven E. Hyman, MD, is Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor and Harald McPike Professor of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology, Harvard University and a Core Institute Member and Director of the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. The Stanley Center conducts global, large-scale studies of neuropsychiatric genetics and develops new technologies and computational tools to inform neurobiological investigations relevant to psychiatric disorders with the goal of identifying biomarkers and advancing therapeutics.
From 2001 to 2011 Hyman served as Provost of Harvard University, the university’s chief academic officer. From 1996 to 2001, he served as Director of the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) where he invested in neuroscience and emerging genomic technologies and initiated a series of large practical clinical trials to inform practice. He has served as Editor of the Annual Review of Neuroscience (2002-2016), founding President of the International Neuroethics Society (2008-2013), President of the Society for Neuroscience (2015), and President of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology (2018). He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a member of the National Academy of Medicine where he chaired the Forum on Neuroscience and Nervous System Disorders, which brings together industry, government, foundations, patient groups, and academia (2012-2018) and served on the governing Council (2012-2018). Hyman chairs the Board of Directors of the Charles A. Dana Foundation (NY) and serves on the boards of the Wyss Center for Bio and Neuroengineering (Geneva) and the scientific publisher Annual Reviews Inc. In the private sector he is a Director of Voyager Therapeutics and of Q-State Biosciences and serves on the scientific advisory boards of Janssen Pharmaceuticals and F-Prime Capital. In 2016, he was awarded the Rhoda and Bernard Sarnat International Prize in Mental Health by the National Academy of Medicine. He received his BA, summa cum laude, from Yale College, an MA from the University of Cambridge, which he attended as a Mellon fellow studying History and Philosophy of Science, and an MD, cum laude, from Harvard Medical School.

Dr. David K. Urion
Biography
David K. Urion, M.D., FAAN received his A.B. from Dartmouth College, with majors in French and Chemistry, in 1976. He graduated from the Stanford University School of Medicine in 1980. After an internship in internal medicine at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, he came to Boston Children’s Hospital in 1981 where he trained in pediatrics and then in child neurology in the Longwood Area Neurology Training Program. He joined the Department of Neurology at BCH in 1985. He has served as the Director of Behavioral Neurology, was the first Director of Education for the Department, and served for over a decade as the program director for the child neurology and neurodevelopmental disabilities residency programs. He holds the Charles F. Barlow Chair in Neurology.
He did fellowships in Clinical Pastoral Education, through the Schwartz Center at the Massachusetts General Hospital, and Bioethics at the Center for Bioethics at HMS. He currently serves as the Co-Chair of the Ethics Advisory Committee at BCH. He is the author of “Compassion as a Subversive Activity: Illness, Community and the Gospel of Mark”.
His interests in bioethics include creating transnational frameworks for highly expensive biologic therapies, ethical frameworks for considering access and equity in “n of 1 treatment trials” and understanding how neuropsychiatry in Weimar and National Socialist Germany became central to euthanasia programs and the Holocaust.

Dr. Bill Shaw
Biography
Bill Shaw is the Vice Provost for Innovation at Tufts University. As the Vice Provost for Innovation, Bill is responsible for business development activities across the University with a particular focus on establishing strategic partnerships, cultivating entrepreneurship, enhancing the physical infrastructure and engaging the global innovation ecosystem. Bill also oversees several key programs including the Office of the Board of Advisors, Tufts Launchpad|Biolabs and Tufts Launchpad Accelerator.
Bill was previously the Executive Director of the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at Massachusetts General Hospital, a Harvard-affiliated Medical School. The Martinos Center is one of the world’s premier research centers focused on biomedical imaging. Bill worked to create an environment where innovation thrives by bringing together the world’s leading scientists, business leaders and patients to solve important healthcare issues. He was responsible for the leadership of the Center and the administration of its $60+ million in research revenue. In addition, he spearheaded business development activities through establishing relationships with academic institutions, industry participants, philanthropic donors and government agencies. Bill is the founder of several start-up companies including Eikonizo Therapeutics, 149 Medical Inc. and BlinkAI Technologies.
Bill also possesses extensive experience in establishing international collaboration agreements with a focus on China and Japan. In 2017, he received the prestigious Eisenhower Fellowship and spent time traveling through China exploring its innovation ecosystem.
Bill earned a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from WPI and a J.D. from the University of New Hampshire School of Law. He also studied Intellectual Property Law at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China. Bill recently finished a fellowship at Harvard Medical School’s Center for Bioethics where he focused on the ethical issues related to the interface of artificial intelligence, neuroscience and business. Bill is a member of the bar of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and is a registered patent attorney at the USPTO.

Dr. Michael J. Young
Biography
Dr. Michael Young is a neurologist and researcher in the Divison of Neurocritical Care at Massachusetts General Hospital, and is Associate Director of the MGH Neurorecovery Clinic. He completed an internal medicine internship at Massachusetts General Hospital followed by Neurology residency and fellowship at Mass General Brigham and Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital specializing in longitudinal care of patients recovering from severe brain injuries and disorders of consciousness. His research examines ethical dimensions and philosophical frameworks underlying standards of care in medicine and neuroscience, and as a member of the Lab for NeuroImaging of Coma and Consciousness (NICC) and Center for Neurotechnology and Neurorecovery (CNTR), is devoted to improving clinical translation of novel neurotechnologies to detect, predict and improve recovery of consciousness in patients with neurologic disorders in settings of diagnostic and prognostic uncertainty. He has been recognized for his clinical and research expertise locally, regionally, nationally and internationally. He received his M.D. from Harvard Medical School with Honors, Magna Cum Laude, where he was awarded the Rose Seegal Award for Research, the Henry K. Beecher Prize in Medical Ethics, and the Neil Samuel Ghiso Fellowship for Compassionate Medical Care. In 2013-2014, he completed a Student Fellowship in the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology and Bioethics at Harvard Law School, and was a Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at Harvard University. He is the recipient of an Early Career Scholar Award from the American Society of Bioethics & Humanities, as well as the Pollard Prize from the Yale Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics. In 2019, Dr. Young was selected as a member of the Academy of Neurology Palatucci Advocacy Leadership Forum, and in 2020 was selected as the recipient of the AAN H. Richard Tyler Award. Prior to arriving at Harvard, Young completed an M.Phil in philosophy from the University of Cambridge as a Gates Cambridge Scholar, focusing on philosophical issues relating to medicine and the mind. His research is supported by the NIH BRAIN Initiative and American Academy of Neurology.

Dr. Insoo Hyun
Biography
Insoo Hyun, PhD, is the inaugural Director of the Center for Life Sciences and Public Learning at the Museum of Science, Boston.
Previously, Dr. Hyun has held academic appointments at Harvard Medical School, where he was Director of Research Ethics and a faculty member in the Center for Bioethics, and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine. He was also Professor of Bioethics and Philosophy at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, where he taught undergraduate, graduate, and medical students for over 18 years.
Since 2005, Dr. Hyun has been heavily involved with the ISSCR (International Society for Stem Cell Research). He has helped draft all of the ISSCR’s international research guidelines and served twice as the Chair of the ISSCR Ethics Committee. His intellectual interests transcend stem cell ethics and policy to include emerging technologies in the life sciences and new strategies for community engagement in bioengineering. Dr. Hyun is a newly-appointed member of NExTRAC – a federal advisory committee that provides recommendations to the NIH Director and a public forum for the discussion of the scientific, safety, and ethical issues associated with emerging biotechnologies.
Dr. Hyun received his BA and MA in Philosophy with Honors in Ethics in Society from Stanford University and his PhD in Philosophy from Brown University. He has been interviewed frequently on National Public Radio and has served on national commissions for the Institute of Medicine and the National Academy of Sciences in Washington D.C. Dr. Hyun is a regular bioethics contributor to Nature, Science, Cell Stem Cell, among many other academic and scientific journals. His book, Bioethics and the Future of Stem Cell Research, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2013.

Christine Mitchell
Biography
Christine Mitchell trained at Boston University with bachelor’s (1973) and master’s (1976) degrees in nursing. and in ethics and religion at Harvard University (1982) with the support of a Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Fellowship in Medical Ethics. She founded the ethics program at Boston Children’s Hospital, directing the ethics consultation service and leading their Ethics Advisory Committee for over 30 years. In 2014 she became Executive Director of the new Center for Bioethics at Harvard Medical School, where she helped to launch a master of science degree in bioethics, developing their Capstone program as well as Consortia on Clinical Ethics and Research Ethics, and the Leadership Group of ethics committees at 16 Harvard-affiliated teaching hospitals. She retired from her Executive Director role in 2022 but continues at HMS as a Lecturer in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at HMS.
Mitchell has lectured on topics in bioethics all over the United States, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Greece, Germany, Indonesia, Japan, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, and the UK. She is President of the Association of Bioethics Program Directors and has served on numerous national committees and commissions, including the Clinical Ethics Consultation Committee for the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities, the Ethics Committee for the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the International Society for Neuroethics, and the Ethics Advisory Board for the Human Brain Project funded by the European Commission. She has written over 180 articles and chapters on topics in bioethics. Her published work includes documentary films, including one nominated for an Academy Award.
Affiliated Consultants

Dr. Joseph J. Fins
Biography
Joseph J. Fins is The E. William Davis, Jr. M.D. Professor of Medical Ethics and Chief of the Division of Medical Ethics at Weill Cornell Medical College where he is a Tenured Professor of Medicine, Professor of Medicine in Psychiatry, Professor of Medical Ethics in Neurology, Professor of Medical Ethics in Rehabilitation Medicine, and Professor of Health Care Policy and Research. He is the founding Chair of the Ethics Committee of New York-Presbyterian Weill Cornell Medical Center where he is an Attending Physician and Director of Medical Ethics. A member of the Adjunct Faculty of Rockefeller University and Senior Attending Physician at The Rockefeller University Hospital, he codirects, the Consortium for the Advanced Study of Brain Injury (CASBI) at Weill Cornell Medicine and Rockefeller. In 2014, he served as the Dwight H. Terry Visiting Scholar in Bioethics and Visiting Professor in the History of Medicine at Yale. In 2015, he was appointed the Solomon Center Distinguished Scholar in Medicine, Bioethics and the Law at Yale Law School and directs CASBI@YLS. He is currently a Visiting Professor of Law at Yale Law School in addition to his appointment at Weill Cornell Medicine. Dr. Fins is an elected Member of the National Academy of Medicine (formerly the Institute of Medicine) of the National Academies of Sciences, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and by Royal Appointment an Academico de Honor (Honored Academic) of the Real Academia Nacional de Medicina de España (the Royal National Academy of Medicine of Spain). In 2022, he was elected to the Association of American Physicians.
A recipient of a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Investigator Award in Health Policy Research, Dr. Fins has also received a Soros Open Society Institute Project on Death in America Faculty Scholars Award, a Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation Visiting Fellowship and support from the Greenwall, Dana, Buster, and Katz Foundations as well as the National Institutes of Health, amongst others. He was appointed by President Clinton to The White House Commission on Complementary and Alternative Medicine Policy and currently serves on The New York State Task Force on Life and the Law by gubernatorial appointment. In 2015, Dr. Fins received the Patricia Price Browne Prize in Biomedical Ethics from the University of Oklahoma School of Medicine. He was the 2019 recipient of the Nicholas E. Davies Memorial Scholar Award for Scholarly Activities in the Humanities and the History of Medicine of the American College of Physicians and served as the David Barap Brin Visiting Professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in 2020.
In 2021, he completed service on the National Academies of Sciences “Standing Committee to Advise the Department of State on Unexplained Health Effects on U.S. Government Employees and their Families at Overseas Embassies.” Dr. Fins was graduated from Wesleyan University (B.A. with Honors, The College of Letters, 1982) and Cornell University Medical College (M.D., 1986). He completed his residency in Internal Medicine and Fellowship in General Internal Medicine at The New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center and has served as Associate for Medicine at The Hastings Center. He is a Diplomat of the American Board of Internal Medicine.
The author of over 500 papers, chapters, essays, and books, his most recent volume is Rights Come to Mind: Brain Injury, Ethics and The Struggle for Consciousness (Cambridge University Press, 2015). Dr. Fins is also the author of A Palliative Ethic of Care: Clinical Wisdom at Life’s End (Jones and Bartlett, 2006). Dr. Fins is a co-author of the 2007 Nature paper describing the first use of deep brain stimulation (DBS) in the minimally conscious state. He is currently a co-investigator on an NIH BRAIN Initiative grant studying DBS in severe to moderate traumatic brain injury and principal investigator on an NIH study entitled, “Cognitive Restoration: Neuroethics and Disability Rights.” A developer of clinical pragmatism as a method of moral problem solving for medicine, Professor Fins’ current scholarly interests include: ethical and policy issues in brain injury and disorders of consciousness; civil and disability rights for individuals with severe brain injury; palliative care; research ethics in neurology and psychiatry; medical education; methods of ethics case consultation; the history of medicine; medical humanities; bioethics in the Spanish-speaking world; and more broadly fostering a productive dialogue between the sciences and the humanities.
Dr. Fins is an associate editor of the 4th Edition of the Encyclopedia of Bioethics and the Journal of Clinical Ethics and edits the Ethics Section of the Journal of Head Trauma Rehabilitation. He sits on the editorial boards of: The Hastings Center Report; Ethics and Human Research; The Pharos Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Medical Society; Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics; BioMed Central Medical Ethics; Neuroethics; Neuromodulation; American Journal of Bioethics; and Neuromodulation as well as the MIT Basic Bioethics Series and the Springer Press Neuroethics Book Series. Professor Fins is President of the International Neuroethics Society, a Past President of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities, and a member of Board of Trustees of The Hastings Center. He is the lone North American to serve on the Comisión Académica of the Instituto Universitario de Investigación Ortega y Gasset of the Fundación OrtegaMarañón, Madrid, Spain.
Dr. Fins is a Fellow of The Royal College of Physicians (London), The Hastings Center, and The New York Academy of Medicine where he served as a Fellow Ambassador. He was appointed to the Council of the Europaische Akademie (Germany) and is an elected member of the Dana Alliance for Brain Initiatives, the American Clinical and Climatological Association, and Alpha Omega Alpha. A Master and past Governor of the American College of Physicians, Dr. Fins has been honored with the College’s Laureate Award. He is a Trustee Emeritus of Wesleyan University, which has recognized him with its Distinguished Alumnus Award and an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters.
Graduate Researchers
Omar Gaidarov
Tufts School of Medicine
Meghana Vagwala
Harvard School of Medicine
Undergraduate Researchers
Jenna Albezreh
Harvard University
Alexander Chen
Harvard University
Allie Longworth
Boston University