Description of Bioethics Expertise

Dr. Adam M. Finkel is one of the nation’s leading experts in the evolving field of quantitative risk assessment and cost-benefit analysis, with 25 years of experience improving methods of analysis and making risk-based decisions to protect workers and the general public from environmental hazards. He is currently a Fellow at the Penn Law School and Executive Director of the Penn Program on Regulation; he is also a professor of environmental and occupational health at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ) School of Public Health. From 2004-2008, he was a Visiting Professor of Public and International Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University. From 1995 to 2003, he was Director of Health Standards Programs at the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), and was responsible for promulgating and evaluating regulations to protect the nation’s workers from chemical, radiological, and biological hazards, and then served as OSHA’s Regional Administrator for the Rocky Mountain states. He recently received the David P. Rall Award from the American Public Health Association for “a career in advancing science in the service of public health protection.”

Adam’s primary research interests are (1) quantifying and communicating the uncertainties in risk estimates, and critically examining the claim that risk estimates are invariably too “conservative”; (2) designing policies and interventions that account for variations in human susceptibility to environmental and occupational disease; and (3) evaluating policies and technologies that show promise for reducing environmental and occupational exposures simultaneously, rather than transferring risks from one population to the other. His other interests relevant to bioethics include genetic screening in the workplace (he was OSHA’s representative in drafting Executive Order 13145), law and policy affecting in vitro fertilization, and the rights of “whistleblowers” (he left OSHA having successfully reversed a policy decision not to offer medical testing to OSHA employees at high risk of developing chronic beryllium disease).

Adam has an Sc.D. in environmental health sciences from the Harvard School of Public Health, a master’s degree in public policy from Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, an A.B. in biology from Harvard College, and is a Certified Industrial Hygienist. He lives in Pennington, New Jersey, with his wife (a clinical psychologist) and 9-year-old daughter; he is also a professional singer and choral conductor.


SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

Finkel, A.M. (2008). “Perceiving Others’ Perceptions of Risk: Still a Task for Sisyphus.” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences: 1128: 121-137 (volume entitled Strategies for Risk Communication: Evolution, Evidence, Experience).

Finkel, A.M. (2008). “Protecting People in Spite of—Or Thanks To—the ‘Veil of Ignorance’.” Chapter 17 (pp. 290-342) in Genomics and Environmental Regulation: Science, Ethics, and Law, Johns Hopkins Univ. Press (Richard R. Sharp, Gary E. Marchant, and Jamie A. Grodsky, eds.).