Steven Joffe, MD, MPH is a pediatric oncologist and bioethicist who is currently the Art and Ilene Penn Professor and Chair of the Department of Medical Ethics & Health Policy, and Professor of Pediatrics, at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine.  He is also the Director of the Penn Postdoctoral Training Program in the Ethical, Legal and Social Implications (ELSI) of Genetics and Genomics.

Dr. Joffe’s research addresses the many ethical challenges that arise in the conduct of clinical and translational investigation.  He has led NIH-, PCORI- and foundation-funded projects to study the roles and responsibilities of principal investigators in multicenter randomized trials, accountability in the clinical research enterprise, children’s capacity to engage in research decisions, return of individual genetic results to participants in epidemiologic cohort studies, the integration of whole-exome sequencing technologies into the clinical care of cancer patients, strategies for diagnosis of germline risk among young adults with cancer, and the nature and challenges of learning health systems. He has coauthored over 200 articles addressing these topics.  He previously served as a member of the US Department of Health and Human Services Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) Vaccine Data and Safety Monitoring Board and chaired the National Human Genome Research Institute’s Genomics and Society Working Group. He is an elected member of the US National Academy of Medicine.

Dr. Joffe attended Harvard College, received his medical degree from the University of California at San Francisco, 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.