Title
Professor of Bioethics, Joint Medical Program

Department
School of Public Health


Faculty URL
http://sph.berkeley.edu/jodi-halpern

Email
jhalpern@berkeley.edu

Phone
(510) 642-4366

Fax
(510) 643-8771


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Research Expertise and Interest
public health, bioethics, patient autonomy

Research Description
Jodi Halpern. M.D., Ph.D (Philosophy) is Professor of Bioethics and Medical Humanities in the Joint Medical Program and the School of Public Health at UC Berkeley. Her work brings together psychiatry, philosophy, affective forecasting and decision neuroscience to elucidate how people imagine and influence their own and each other's future health possibilities. Her first book,?From Detached Concern to Empathy: Humanizing Medical Practice?was called a “seminal work” by the Journal of the American Medical Association. Her upcoming book?Remaking the Self in the Wake of Illness?focuses on how people with health losses in the prime of life experience value and identity shifts. Her scholarly articles focus on topics that include emotions and decision-making, social dominance and bullying, post-war social reconciliation and the ethics of innovative technologies. Her work appears in publications such as the?Journal of General Internal Medicine,?Pediatrics,?Emotion Review,?Journal of Bioethics Neuroscience,?Gerontology?and?Global Public Health?as well as in popular media. Her current scholarship focuses on how innovative technologies change how we adapt to health losses, how we view our futures and the trajectory of empathic curiosity across differences. Her new book project “Engineering Empathy” looks at the upcoming uses of technology in emotional relationships, including using AI/robotics in caregiving (AI psychotherapy, elder and childcare), the influence of virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR) on empathy, and the influence of gaming on mental health. Halpern is also doing embedded research with scientists developing new technologies in neuroscience and gene editing. Halpern is invited to present this work internationally, including at the 2018 meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland and at the 2018 Herrenhausen Conference on Translational Neuroscience in Germany.
Research Interests:?
Ethics of innovative technologies (AI, gene editing and neurotechnology)
Emotions and decision-making
Empathy and healthcare ethics
Public health ethics/distributitve justice
Patient autonomy, agency, and human rights