Dr. Halpern is Chancellor’s Chair and Professor of Bioethics at UC Berkeley. Halpern’s research integrates psychiatry and philosophy to examine the emotional basis of beliefs about the future and how innovative technologies influence empathy and social justice. Halpern’s book, From Detached Concern to Empathy: Humanizing Medical Practice, catalyzed a wave of change in medical education. Her second book, Remaking the Self in the Wake of Illness (2023), presents a new model for post-traumatic growth, and she has begun a third project Engineering Empathy. She is Faculty Director of the Berkeley Group on the Ethics and Regulation of Innovative Technologies and co-founded the UC Berkeley Kavli Institute for Ethics, Science and the Public in 2022.
Dr. Halpern works in the United States and internationally to help governments address serious social divisions related to bioethics, including a new project with the City of Los Angeles addressing conflicts over Covid-19. She received the Guggenheim 2022 Award in Medicine and Health. Her newest body of research examines how innovative technologies such as gene editing and artificial intelligence transform relationships and society in unexpected ways, often creating social divides, some of which can be mitigated through lessons learned from bioethics.
For more information, visit: www.jodihalpern.com