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Jeffrey Kahn is Director of the Center for Bioethics, and holds the Maas Family Endowed Chair in Bioethics. He is also Professor in the Department of Medicine, School of Medicine; and holds affiliated appointments in the School of Public Health and Department of Philosophy. The Center is a leading research center for bioethics, with 15 full- and part-time faculty. Its mission consists of education, research, and outreach in the area of bioethics. The Center's work focuses on bioethics at the policy level, working closely with policy makers, health care professionals, and the university communities, and the Center and its faculty are recognized for their work nationally and internationally.
Prior to joining the faculty at the University of Minnesota in 1996, Dr. Kahn was Director of the Graduate Program in Bioethics and Assistant Professor of Bioethics, at the Medical College of Wisconsin. From April 1994 to October 1995, he was Associate Director of the White House Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, where he was part of a three-person team running the effort of a professional staff of over 100. The Committee's work culminated in the publication of a thousand page report, and published in book form by Oxford University Press under the title The Human Radiation Experiments (1996).
Dr. Kahn works in a variety of areas of bioethics, exploring the intersection of ethics and public health policy, including research ethics, ethics and genetics, and ethical issues in public health. His degrees are in microbiology (BA, UCLA, 1983); health policy (MPH, Johns Hopkins, 1988); and philosophy/bioethics (PhD, Georgetown, 1989). He has served on numerous state and federal advisory panels, and speaks nationally and internationally on a range of bioethics topics. He has recently published a book examining justice and research ethics, entitled Beyond Consent: Seeking Justice in Research, published by Oxford University Press; and wrote the bi-weekly column "Ethics Matters" on CNN Interactive (CNN.com) from 1998 to 2002.