Innovations in End-of-Life Care
an international journal of leaders in end-of-life care

Joseph J. Fins, MD, FACP
Joseph J. Fins, MD, FACP is chief of the Division of Medical Ethics in the Departments of Public Health and Medicine at Weill Medical College of Cornell University where he serves as associate professor of Medicine, Public Health, as well as Medicine in Psychiatry. In addition, Dr. Fins is director of Medical Ethics at New York-Presbyterian Weill Cornell Medical Center, associate for Medicine at The Hastings Center, and Physician-Ethicist-in-Residence at the HealthCare Chaplaincy in New York City. He is a recipient of a Project on Death in America Faculty Scholars Award and a Woodrow Wilson Foundation Visiting Fellowship. In July 2000, Dr. Fins was appointed by President Clinton to the White House Commission on Complementary and Alternative Medicine Policy.

A diplomat of the American Board of Internal Medicine, Dr. Fins is a graduate of Wesleyan University (BA with Departmental Honors, The College of Letters, 1982) and Cornell University Medical College (MD, 1986). He completed his residency in Internal Medicine and a Fellowship in General Internal Medicine at The New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center.

A practicing internist, Dr. Fins is on the attending staff on the Cornell Campus of New York-Presbyterian Hospital, where he chairs the hospital’s ethics committee. Dr. Fins teaches medicine and clinical ethics to Weill-Cornell medical students and housestaff at New York-Presbyterian Hospital.

Dr. Fins is the author of more than 100 publications in medical ethics. His scholarly work includes articles on the allocation of health care resources, health care reform, economics and medicine, managed care, end-of-life decisions, palliative care, futility, advance directives, the doctor-patient relationship, postgraduate medical education, physician assisted suicide, brain death, ecosystem health, medical ethics in a pluralistic society, regenerative medicine, and clinical pragmatism as a method of moral problem solving for medicine. His work has appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine, Annals of Internal Medicine, Hastings Center Report, Journal of the American Medical Association, Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics, Journal of Clinical Ethics, Archives of Psychiatry, General Hospital Psychiatry, Journal of Pain and Symptom Management, Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, and other leading journals.

Dr. Fins serves on the board of Partnership for Caring and is a trustee advisor of the Princeton University Bioethics Forum. He is an advisory board member of the Metropolitan New York Ethics Committee Network at the New York Academy of Medicine and a member of the advisory board of the New York Citizens’ Commission on Health Decisions. Formerly the vice chair of the Ethics Committee of the American Geriatrics Society, he is a member of the Health and Public Policy Committee of the New York Chapter of the American College of Physicians and an adjunct member of the Association of the Bar on the City of New York.

A Fellow of both the American College of Physicians and the New York Academy of Medicine, Dr. Fins is also the recipient of the Health Advocacy Award of the New York Society of Patient Representatives and the Wholeness of Life Award of the HealthCare Chaplaincy. He has served as an honorary academic consultant to CETIN, the Ethics Committee for Clinical Investigations of the Argentine Association for Clinical Investigation, and is an honorary member of the Advisory Board of the Institute for the Study of Humanities and Bioethics "Eugenio Maria de Hostos" of the Faculty of Medical Sciences of the University of Puerto Rico. Dr. Fins served on Mayor-Elect Rudolph Giuliani’s Transition Team Health Care Advisory Group and has been a consultant to the Pan American and World Health Organizations. From 1997-1998, Dr. Fins served on the New York State Attorney General’s Commission on Quality Care at the End of Life.

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