The Founders Professorship of Medical Ethics and Health Policy

The Founders Professorship of Medical Ethics and Health Policy was established anonymously in 2018.

Current Chairholder
Steven Joffe, MD, MPH

Steven Joffe is a pediatric oncologist and bioethicist who is currently a Professor of Pediatrics at the Perelman School of Medicine.  He is also the Director of the Penn Fellowship in Advanced Biomedical Ethics and the Penn Postdoctoral Training Program in the Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications (ELSI) of Genetics and Genomics.

Dr. Joffe's research addresses the many ethical challenges that arise in the conduct of clinical and translational investigation.  He has led NIH and foundation grants to study the roles and responsibilities of principal investigators in multicenter randomized trials, accountability in the clinical research enterprise, children’s capacity to engage in research decisions, return of individual genetic results to participants in epidemiologic cohort studies, and the integration of whole-exome sequencing technologies into the clinical care of cancer patients. He has co-authored over 100 articles addressing these topics.  He serves as a member of the FDA’s Pediatrics Ethics Subcommittee, the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center Board of Scientific Counselors, and the National Human Genome Research Institute’s Genomics and Society Working Group.

Dr. Joffe attended Harvard College, received his medical degree from the University of California at San Francisco, and received his public health degree from UC Berkeley.  He trained in pediatrics at UCSF and undertook fellowship training in pediatric hematology/oncology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Boston Children’s Hospital.