Jodi Halpern, MD, PhD

“AI is changing our capacity for empathy and human relationships in fundamental ways.”

Jodi Halpern MD, PhD, Chancellor’s Chair and Professor of Bioethics at UC Berkeley, is an international leader on empathy in healthcare, emotionally resilient leadership and the ethics of innovative technologies, especially AI, genome editing and neurotechnology.

Dr. Halpern’s newest project Engineering Empathy examines the role of AI in mental health (Halpern is a psychiatrist).  Halpern co-founded and co-directs the Kavli Center for Ethics, Science and the Public and the Berkeley Group on the Ethics and Regulation of Innovative Technologies. Halpern advises NGOs, companies, and governments. 

Halpern’s book, From Detached Concern to Empathy: Humanizing Medical Practice catalyzed a wave of change in medicine.  Her Guggenheim award-winning research on Remaking the Self in the Wake of Illness (book expected in 2025) provides a new approach to emotional resilience for individuals and she is applying this work to companies with great success.  

Dr. Halpern speaks in settings ranging from Aspen Health and the World Economic Forum, Davos to NPR, CBS News, CNN.  She  keynotes major health, leadership and technology conferences (Kaiser called her their number one speaker) and meets with smaller groups of leaders for in-depth discussion sessions. See Jodihalpern.com

A graduate of Yale University with an MD and a PhD in philosophy, Halpern received the Porter Prize for Outstanding Dissertation of Human Interest across all disciplines at Yale University.  She completed her psychiatry residency at UCLA, followed by a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar Fellowship in Health Services. As a faculty member, she has received highly competitive fellowships from Princeton University, the Greenwall Faculty Scholars Program, the Townsend Humanities Center, the University of California Women’s Leadership Initiative, as well as Endowed Lectureships from many leading universities, including Yale, Princeton, Johns Hopkins, The Aspen Institute and The Royal College of Medicine. 

Dr. Halpern has published over seventy influential scholarly articles and received awards for mentorship and leadership as well as the honor of being named a Chancellor’s Chair Professor at the University of California, Berkeley.