Scott Halpern, MD, PhD

Scott D. Halpern, M.D., Ph.D. is Professor of Medicine, Epidemiology, and Medical Ethics and Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, and a practicing critical care medicine doctor. He is the founding Director of the Palliative and Advanced Illness Research (PAIR) Center, which generates evidence to advance policies and practices that improve the lives of all people affected by serious illness. He is also the founding Director of the Fostering Improvement in End-of-Life Decision Science (FIELDS) program, the nation’s only program that applies behavioral economic principles to understand and improve upon the health decisions made by seriously ill patients, their caregivers, and their clinicians.

Among his more than 40 awards are the Greenwall Foundation Faculty Scholar Award in Bioethics, AcademyHealth’s Alice S. Hersh New Investigator Award, the Young Leader Award from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the American Federation for Medical Research’s Outstanding Investigator Award for the best scientist in any field under the age of 45, and the Association of Clinical and Translational Science’s Distinguished Investigator Award for lifetime achievement in translation of clinical practice into public benefit and policy. He is an elected member of the American Society of Clinical Investigation, a member of the Editorial Boards of the Annals of Internal Medicine and the American Journal of Bioethics, and from 2013 – 2015 he was an Anniversary Fellow at the Institute of Medicine.