Art Caplan

Currently the Drs. William F and Virginia Connolly Mitty Professor and founding head of the Division of Bioethics at New York University Langone Medical Center in New York City.

He is the co-founder and Dean of Research of the NYU Sports and Society Program and the head of the ethics program in the Global Institute for Public Health at NYU.

Prior to coming to NYU he was the Sidney D. Caplan Professor of Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine in Philadelphia where he created the Center for Bioethics and the Department of Medical Ethics. Caplan has also taught at the University of Minnesota, where he founded the Center for Biomedical Ethics, the University of Pittsburgh, and Columbia University. He received his PhD from Columbia University.

Caplan is the author or editor of thirty-two books and over 600 papers in peer reviewed journals. His most recent books are Contemporary
Debates in Bioethics (Wiley 2013) and Ethics in Mental Healthcare: A Reader (MIT Press, 2013).

He has served on a number of national and international committees including as the Chair, National Cancer Institute Biobanking Ethics Working Group; the Chair of the Advisory Committee to the United Nations on Human Cloning; the Chair of the Advisory Committee to the Department of Health and Human Services on Blood Safety and Availability; a member of the Presidential Advisory Committee on Gulf War Illnesses; the special advisory committee to the International Olympic Committee on genetics and gene therapy; the ethics committee of the American Society of Gene Therapy; the special advisory panel to the National Institutes of Mental Health on human experimentation on vulnerable subjects and the Wellcome Trust on research in humanitarian crises. He served as the Co-Director of the Joint Council of Europe/United Nations Study on Trafficking in Organs and Body Parts. He is currently the ethics advisor to DOD/DARPA on synthetic biology, a member of the National Council on Youth Sports Safety, on the board of Directors of the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law and a member of the Ethics and Ebola Working Group of the World Health Organization.

Caplan writes a column on bioethics for NBC.com. He is a commentator on bioethics and health care issues for WebMD/Medscape. He is a regular commentator on medicine and science for WGBH radio in Boston. He appears frequently as a guest and commentator on va