Jodi Halpern

Dr. Jodi Halpern is a Professor of Bioethics and Medical Humanities at the University of California, Berkeley School of Public Health. She co-founded the Berkeley Group for the Ethics and Regulation of Innovative Technologies and serves as the Co-Director of the Kavli Center for Ethics, Science, and the Public at UC Berkeley.

• MD and PhD in Philosophy from Yale University
• Former Psychiatry Resident at UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute
• Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar Fellowship

Her research focuses on the intersection of psychiatry, philosophy, and decision science to examine how innovative technologies transform human relationships and society. This includes AI psychotherapy, gene editing ethics, and virtual reality applications for empathy development.

Her recent publications highlight concerns about AI replacing human empathy in healthcare, ethical implications of germline genome editing, and the importance of empathic curiosity in resolving conflicts. She has explored how emotional thought processes influence decision-making and how people adapt to health losses through psychological transformation.

• Guggenheim Fellowship in Health and Medicine (2022)
• Chancellor’s Chair at UC Berkeley (2019)
• Greenwall Faculty Scholars Fellowship
• Rockefeller Fellowship at Princeton University

As a consultant and speaker, Halpern advises organizations like the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, Kaiser Permanente, and the Los Angeles Mayor’s office on ethical technology implementation. Her work has been featured at the World Economic Forum in Davos and she maintains an active role in training the next generation of bioethics scholars.