Harald Schmidt

Harald Schmidt is an Associate Professor of Medical Ethics & Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania's Perelman School of Medicine. He also serves as a Research Associate at the Center for Health Incentives and Behavioral Economics and a Senior Fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute. Additionally, he is a member of UNESCO's Ethics Task Force.

Dr. Schmidt earned his PhD in Health & Public Policy from the London School of Economics and Political Science and an MA in Philosophy from Universität Münster in Germany. Prior to joining Penn, he was a Commonwealth Fund Harkness Fellow in Health Care Policy and Practice at the Harvard School of Public Health and served for seven years as Assistant Director of the U.K.'s Nuffield Council on Bioethics in London.

His research critically examines how health policies aimed at promoting individual behavior and fair resource allocation often fail to consider structural disadvantage, overestimate individual choice capacity, and risk exacerbating existing health inequities. Dr. Schmidt's work focuses on improving opportunity and reducing disadvantage for marginalized populations in health promotion and healthcare priority setting, with particular attention to policies like wellness incentives, Medicaid work requirements, and vaccine/ventilator allocation frameworks during the pandemic.

His publication record demonstrates a consistent focus on the intersection of ethics, policy, and equity, with recent work addressing equitable vaccine allocation, ventilator rationing, and the ethical implications of personal responsibility policies in healthcare. His research combines conceptual and empirical approaches to develop constructive proposals for improving equity in health promotion and priority setting.

Dr. Schmidt's professional trajectory shows a commitment to bridging academic research with policy impact, having worked at major institutions including the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, Harvard School of Public Health, and now the University of Pennsylvania, where he contributes to multiple research centers focused on health incentives and behavioral economics.