Senior Fellow

Steven Joffe, MD, MPH

  • Professor, Medical Ethics and Health Policy, Perelman School of Medicine
  • Professor, Pediatrics, Perelman School of Medicine

Steven Joffe, MD, MPH (he/him) is a pediatric oncologist and bioethicist who is currently the Art and Ilene Penn Professor of Medical Ethics & Health Policy and Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine. He is also Director of the Penn Postdoctoral Training Program in Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications (ELSI) of Genetics and Genomics.

Dr. Joffe’s research addresses the ethical challenges that arise in the conduct of clinical and translational investigation. He has led NIH-, PCORI- and foundation-funded projects to study the roles and responsibilities of principal investigators in multicenter randomized trials, accountability in the clinical research enterprise, children’s capacity to engage in research decisions, return of individual genetic results to participants in epidemiologic cohort studies, the integration of whole-exome sequencing technologies into the clinical care of cancer patients, strategies for diagnosis of germline risk among young adults with cancer, and the nature and challenges of learning health systems. He has coauthored over 200 articles addressing these topics. He serves as a member of the FDA’s Pediatrics Ethics Subcommittee and of the Department of Health and Human Services Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) Vaccine Data and Safety Monitoring Board and chairs the National Human Genome Research Institute’s Genomics and Society Working Group.

Dr. Joffe attended Harvard College, received his medical degree from the University of California San Francisco, and received his public health degree from UC Berkeley. He trained in pediatrics at UCSF and in pediatric hematology/oncology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and at Boston Children’s Hospital.

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