Education
ScD, Johns Hopkins University, 1989
Overview
Nancy Kass, ScD, is the Phoebe R. Berman Professor of Bioethics and Public Health, in the Department of Health Policy and Management, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Deputy Director for Public Health in the Berman Institute of Bioethics. In 2009-2010, Dr. Kass was based in Geneva, Switzerland, where she was working with the World Health Organization (WHO) Ethics Review Committee Secretariat. Dr. Kass received her BA from Stanford University, completed doctoral training in health policy from the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, and was awarded a National Research Service Award to complete a postdoctoral fellowship in bioethics at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Georgetown University. Dr. Kass conducts empirical work in bioethics and health policy. Her publications are primarily in the field of U.S. and international research ethics, HIV/AIDS ethics policy, public health ethics, and ethics of public health preparedness. She is co-editor of HIV, AIDS and Childbearing: Public Policy, Private Lives (Oxford University Press, 1996). Dr. Kass currently chairs the national Precision Medicine Initiative central IRB and she serves on the Health and Medicine Division committee of the National Academy of Medicine. Previously, she co-chaired the National Cancer Institute Committee to develop Recommendations for Informed Consent Documents for Cancer Clinical Trials, and served on the NCI’s central IRB. She has served as consultant to the President’s Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, to the National Bioethics Advisory Commission, and to the National Academy of Sciences. Current research projects examine ethics for a learning healthcare system, informed consent in randomized trials, ethics issues that arise in international health research and ethics and outbreak response. Dr. Kass teaches the Bloomberg School of Public Health’s course on U.S. and International Research Ethics and Integrity, served as director of the PhD program in bioethics and health policy for 15 years, and is the director (with Adnan Hyder) of the Johns Hopkins Fogarty African Bioethics Training Program. Dr. Kass is an elected member of the Institute of Medicine and a Fellow of the Hastings Center.
Honors and Awards
Member, Institute of Medicine, 2008
Fellow, Hastings Center, 2007
Delta Omega Honorary Society in Public Health, 1996
AMTRA (Advising, Mentoring, and Teaching Award), Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, 1996
National Research Service Award, National Center for Health Services Research and Health Care Technology Assessment, 1990
Dissertation Grant, National Center for Health Services Research and Health Care Technology Assessment, 1988
Public Health Training Grant, 1986
Dean's Award for Service, Stanford University, 1983