Joseph Fins

Joseph J. Fins, M.A.C.P. (born 1959) is an American physician and medical ethicist. He is chief of the Division of Medical Ethics at New York Presbyterian Hospital and Weill Cornell Medical College, where he serves as The E. William Davis, Jr., M.D. Professor of Medical Ethics, and Professor of Medicine, Professor of Public Health, and Professor of Medicine in Psychiatry. Fins is also Director of Medical Ethics and an attending physician at New York Presbyterian Hospital-Weill Cornell Medical Center. Fins is also a member of the adjunct faculty of Rockefeller University and has served as Associate for Medicine at The Hastings Center. He was appointed by President Bill 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.

In October 2010, Fins was elected a member of the Institute of Medicine (IOM) of the United States National Academies. In 2012, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In December 2013 he was elected an Academico de Honor de la Real Academia Nacional de Medicina de Espana (Honored Academic of the Royal Academy of Medicine of Spain).

Fins' scholarship in medical ethics and health policy has focused on palliative care, rational approaches to ethical dilemmas and the development of "clinical pragmatism" as a method of moral problem-solving drawing upon the American pragmatic tradition of William James and John Dewey. His more recent work has been in neuroethics and disorders of consciousness following severe brain injury. He was a co-author of the landmark Nature paper describing the first use of deep brain stimulation in the minimally conscious state.

Fins has been a visiting professor in Medical Ethics at The Complutense University in Madrid and Philipps University in Marburg, Germany. He is a recipient of a Soros Open Society Institute Project on Death in America Faculty Scholars Award, a Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation Visiting Fellowship and a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Investigator Award in Health Policy Research.

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