Stephen Latham

Stephen R. Latham, JD, PhD, is Director of the Yale Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics. Before entering academia full-time, he was secretary to the AMA’s Council on Ethical and Judicial Affairs. He has been a graduate fellow of Harvard’s Safra Center on Ethics, a Research Fellow of the University of Edinburgh’s Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, a vice-chair of the ABA Health Law Section’s Interest Group on Medical Research, Biotechnology and Clinical Ethics, and a board member and Secretary of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities, from which he received a Distinguished Service Award.

Latham’s 100+ publications on bioethics and health law have appeared in law reviews including the Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics, the Journal of Legal Medicine, and the American Journal of Law and Medicine; in scientific and medical journals including JAMA, Nature; the New England Journal of Medicine, Lancet, and BMJ Open; in numerous university-press books; and in bioethics journals including the American Journal of Bioethics, the Journal of Medical Ethics, the Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics, the Yale Journal of Health Policy, Law and Ethics, Public Health Ethics, and the Hastings Center Report, which he serves as a Contributing Editor. He has co-edited several books including the 6-volume Encyclopedia of Bioethics (MacMillan Reference USA, 4th ed. 2014); Genetics, Ethics and Education (Cambridge University Press, 2018); and The American Medical Ethics Revolution (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), which was named by Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries as an “Outstanding Academic Title of 2000.”

Latham’s current work deals with a wide range of bioethics issues from reviving anoxic pig-brains to conducting research in the newly-dead, and from using social media to determine the causes of individuals’ risky sexual behavior to using e-health alerts to enhance the treatment of kidney failure during hospitalization. He has also just recently begun teaching and researching in environmental ethics. Latham’s undergraduate Political Science course, “Bioethics and Law,” is among the largest classes at Yale College.

Latham has served for several years as faculty chair of Yale’s Human Subjects Committee (its social/behavioral IRB), and currently serves as a vice-chair of one of Yale’s biomedical IRBs and co-chair of its Embryonic Stem Cell Research Oversight Committee. He also does clinical ethics consultation with the Pediatric Ethics Committee at Yale-New Haven Childrens Hospital and on the Medical Review Board of Connecticut’s Department of Children and Families.

Education

• PhD , University of California at Berkeley
• JD , Harvard Law School