Steven Joffe
Governing Board MD, MPH Chair, Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy
Art and Ilene Penn Professor of Medical Ethics and Health Policy and Professor of Pediatrics, Perelman School of Medicine
Steven Joffe, MD, MPH, is the Art and Ilene Professor of Medical Ethics and Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine. He serves as Chair of the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy, Chief of the Division of Medical Ethics, and director of a National Human Genome Research Institute-funded postdoctoral fellowship in the ethical, legal, and social implications of genomics. He is also Professor of Pediatrics at the Perelman School of Medicine and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP). Dr. Joffe’s research addresses the many ethical challenges that arise in the conduct of clinical and translational investigation and in genomic medicine, both in pediatric oncology and other areas of medicine and science. He has been the principal investigator (PI) of NIH, Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI), and foundation-funded studies that examine the roles and responsibilities of PIs in multicenter randomized trials, accountability in the clinical research enterprise, governance of learning activities within learning health systems, return of individual genetic results to participants in epidemiologic cohort studies, and the integration of genomic sequencing technologies into cancer care. He has also lectured widely on research ethics and on the ethical, legal, and social implications of genomic technologies.
Dr. Joffe attended Harvard College, received his medical degree from the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF), and received his public health degree from UC Berkeley. He trained in pediatrics at UCSF and undertook fellowship training in pediatric hematology/oncology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Boston Children’s Hospital. Prior to coming to Penn, he served on the faculty of Harvard Medical School, and was an attending pediatric oncologist at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Boston Children’s Hospital, for 13 years.