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Medicine Grand Rounds- “2023 Merrimon Lecture” I. Glenn Cohen presents: Integrating Artificial Intelligence Into Health Care: Ethical and Legal Challenges
October 26, 2023 @ 12:00 pm - 1:30 pm
Prof. Cohen is one of the world’s leading experts on the intersection of bioethics (sometimes also called “medical ethics”) and the law, as well as health law. He also teaches civil procedure. He has advised the U.S. Vice President on reproductive rights, discussed medical AI policy with members of the Korean Congress, and lectured to legal, medical, and industry conferences around the world. His work has been frequently covered by or appeared in PBS, NPR, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, Mother Jones, the New York Times, The Washington Post, the Boston Globe, and many other media venues.
He was the youngest professor on the faculty at Harvard Law School (tenured or untenured) both when he joined the faculty in 2008 (at age 29) and when he was tenured as a full professor in 2013 (at age 34), though not the youngest in history.
Prof. Cohen’s current projects relate to medical AI, mobile health and other health information technologies, abortion, reproduction/reproductive technology, the therapeutic use of psychedelic drugs, research ethics, organ transplantation, rationing in law and medicine, health policy, FDA law, translational medicine, medical tourism and many other topics.
He is the author of more than 200 articles and chapters and his award-winning work has appeared in leading legal (including the Stanford, Cornell, and Southern California Law Reviews), medical (including the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA), bioethics (including the American Journal of Bioethics, the Hastings Center Report), scientific (Science, Cell, Nature Reviews Genetics) and public health (the American Journal of Public Health) journals, as well as Op-Eds in the New York Times, Washington Post, New Republic, Time Magazine, and other venues.
Cohen is the author, co-author, editor, or co-editor of more than 18 books. They include: (Caroline Academic Press, 2022); (Cambridge University Press, 2022) (Cambridge University Press, 2021); (Carolina Academic Press, 2020); (Cambridge University Press, 2020); T (Cambridge University Press, 2019); (Aspen, 2018); (Cambridge University Press, 2018); (Cambridge University Press, 2017); (MIT Press, 2017); (John Hopkins University Press, 2016) (Oxford University Press, 2016); (Columbia University Press, 2015); (Oxford University Press, 2015); (Oxford University Press, 2014); (MIT Press, 2014); (Oxford University Press, 2013).
For his law school teaching he was awarded the HLS Student Government Teaching and Advising Award in 2017. He also sometimes teaches courses at Harvard College and Harvard Medical School. For the public he created the free online Harvard X class , which was nominated by Harvard for . More than 97,000 students have taken the course so far. You can also watch his Tedx talk, He is also the faculty lead on , an online course to help law students transition to law school that has been used by more than half of all U.S. law schools.
Prior to becoming a professor he served as a law clerk to Judge Michael Boudin of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit and as a lawyer for U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Division, Appellate Staff, where he handled litigation in the Courts of Appeals and (in conjunction with the Solicitor General’s Office) in the U.S. Supreme Court. In his spare time (where he can find any!) he still litigates, having authored an amicus brief in the U.S. Supreme Court for leading gene scientist Eric Lander in Association of Molecular Pathology v. Myriad, concerning whether human genes are patent eligible subject matter, a brief that was extensively . Most recently he (the Texas abortion case, on behalf of himself, Melissa Murray, and B. Jessie Hill). He also provides expert testimony in health law and bioethics litigation.
Cohen was selected as a and by . He is also , the leading bioethics think tank in the United States as well as being a fellow of the . He leads the , which is part of the larger He co-leads the Regulatory Foundations, Ethics, and Law Program of program. He is also the lead on the . He previously served as one of the key co-investigators on the multi-million dollar Football Players Health Study at Harvard which is committed to improving the health of NFL players (for more on this work click here). He is also one of three editors-in-chief of the , a peer-reviewed journal published by Oxford University Press and serves on the editorial board for the American Journal of Bioethics. He served on the Steering Committee for Ethics for the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), the Canadian counterpart to the NIH, and the Ethics Committee for the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG). He currently serves on the . He has also served on the bioethics advisory groups for life sciences companies like Otsuka, Illumina, and Bayer.