People

Nir Eyal, D. Phil

Contact Information

Nir Eyal is Associate Professor in Global Health and Social Medicine (Medical Ethics) at the Harvard Medical School.  His primary appointment is at Harvard University’s campus-wide Program in Ethics and Health.  Prior to joining the Harvard faculty, Dr. Eyal was the Harold T. Shapiro Postdoctoral Fellow in Bioethics at the Center for Human Values of Princeton University, and previously, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Clinical Bioethics of the National Institutes of Health.  He holds a DPhil in Politics from Oxford University.  Eyal’s earlier, Philosophy degrees, are from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and from Tel-Aviv University.  Eyal is an associate editor for two journals and co-editor of the Oxford University Press series Population-Level Bioethics.  He chairs the American Philosophical Association’s Committee on Philosophy and Medicine. 

Ongoing Research

Dr. Eyal is writing on ethical issues in HIV research; on ethical ways to address critical health worker shortages; on healthcare rationing in resource-poor settings; on markets in human organs; on the ethical grounds for informed consent; on personal responsibility for health; on the ethics of translational research; on fair risk distribution, and on certifying corporations for improving global health.  Eyal is also completing a book that defends a consequentialist approach to respect for persons and applies that approach to normative questions in bioethics and political theory.  Research outside bioethics surrounds egalitarian theory, self-ownership, basic income guarantee, political domination, and consequentialism.  Eyal’s research was funded by NIAID, CIHR, and the EJ Safra Center for Ethics.