Arthur L. Caplan PhD

Dr. Arthur Leonard Caplan, Ph.D., is the Drs. William F and Virginia Connolly Mitty Professor and the founding director of the Division of Medical Ethics in NYU Langone Medical Center’s Department of Population Health. Prior to coming to NYU Langone, Caplan was the Sidney D. Caplan Professor of Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine in Philadelphia, where he created the Center for Bioethics and the Department of Medical Ethics. Dr. Caplan also taught at the University of Minnesota, where he founded the Center for Biomedical Ethics, the University of Pittsburgh, and Columbia University. He was the Associate Director of the Hastings Center from 1984-1987.

Dr. Caplan has served on a number of national and international committees including the Chair, National Cancer Institute Biobanking Ethics Working Group; the Chair of the Advisory Committee to the United Nations on Human Cloning; the Chair of the Advisory Committee to the Department of Health and Human Services on Blood Safety and Availability; a member of the Presidential Advisory Committee on Gulf War Illnesses; the special advisory committee to the International Olympic Committee on genetics and gene therapy; the ethics committee of the American Society of Gene Therapy; the special advisory panel to the National Institutes of Mental Health on human experimentation on vulnerable subjects and the Wellcome Trust on research in humanitarian crises.

He is a member of the board of directors of The Franklin Institute, the Board of Visitors of the Columbia University School of Nursing, and the Board of Directors of the American Association of University Professors Foundation. Dr. Caplan served as the Co-Director of the Joint Council of Europe/United Nations Study on Trafficking in Organs and Body Parts. He is currently the ethics advisor on synthetic biology to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, an agency of the United States Department of Defense.