Joseph J. Fins, M.D., D. Hum. Litt. (hc), M.A.C.P., F.R.C.P.(London) is The E. William Davis, Jr. M.D. Professor of Medical Ethics and Chief of the Division of Medical Ethics at Weill Cornell Medical College where he is a Tenured Professor of Medicine. He is the founding Chair of the Ethics Committee of New York-Presbyterian Weill Cornell Medical Center where he is an Attending Physician and Director of Medical Ethics.
A member of the Adjunct Faculty of Rockefeller University and Senior Attending Physician at The Rockefeller University Hospital, he co-directs, the Consortium for the Advanced Study of Brain Injury (CASBI) at Weill Cornell Medicine and Rockefeller. At Yale Law School he is the Solomon Center Distinguished Scholar in Medicine, Bioethics and the Law and a Visiting Professor of Law at Yale Law School. The author of over 500 papers, chapters, essays, and books, his most recent volume is Rights Come to Mind: Brain Injury, Ethics, and the Struggle for Consciousness (Cambridge University Press).
He was appointed by President Clinton to The White House Commission on Complementary and Alternative Medicine Policy and currently serves on The New York State Task Force on Life and the Law by gubernatorial appointment. Fins is President of the International Neuroethics Society, a Past President of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities, and Chair-Elect of the Hastings Center Board of Trustees.
He is an elected Member of the National Academy of Medicine (formerly the Institute of Medicine) of the National Academies of Sciences, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and by Royal Appointment an Academico de Honor (Honored Academic) of the Real Academia Nacional de Medicina de España (the Royal National Academy of Medicine of Spain). Dr. Fins is a Trustee Emeritus of Wesleyan University, which has recognized him with an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters. While on sabbatical at Princeton, Fins will teach a course with Professor Brooke Holmes entitled, “Bio/Ethics: Ancient and Modern” and conduct archival research for a biography of the physician-humanist, Dr. Lewis Thomas ’33.
