James F. Childress, Ph.D.
2400 Old Ivy Road • (434) 924 6568
Halsey Hall • (434) 924 6724 (or 3741) • jfc7c@virginia.edu
James F. Childress is the John Allen Hollingsworth Professor of Ethics and Professor of Medical Education at the University of Virginia. He teaches in the Department of Religious Studies and directs the university-wide Institute for Practical Ethics and Public Life. Dr. Childress served as chair of Religious Studies from 1972 to 1975 and again from 1986 to 1994, as well as principal of UVA's Monroe Hill College from 1988 to 1991, and as co-director of the Virginia Health Policy Center from 1991 to 1999. In 1990 he was named Professor of the Year in the Commonwealth of Virginia by the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education, and in 2002 he received the University of Virginia's highest honor, the Thomas Jefferson Award. He received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Society of Bioethics and Humanities in 2004.
Childress is the author of numerous articles and several books in biomedical ethics, including Principles of Biomedical Ethics (with Tom L. Beauchamp), now in its fifth edition and translated into several other languages; Priorities in Biomedical Ethics; Who Should Decide? Paternalism in Health Care; and Practical Reasoning in Bioethics, along with a number of articles and books in other areas of ethics. He is also co-editor of Belmont Revisited: Ethical Principles for Biomedical Research (with Eric Meslin and Harold Shapiro).
Childress was vice chair of the national Task Force on Organ Transplantation and has also served on the Board of Directors of the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS), the UNOS Ethics Committee, the Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee, the Human Gene Therapy Subcommittee, the Biomedical Ethics Advisory Committee, and several Data and Safety Monitoring Boards for NIH clinical trials. He was a member of the presidentially appointed National Bioethics Advisory Commission from 1996 to 2001, was co-chair of a National Research Council committee that issued a report on Intentional Human Dosing Studies for EPA Regulatory Purposes: Scientific and Ethical Issues (2004), and chair of an Institute of Medicine Committee that issued a report on Organ Donation: Opportunities for Action (2006).
Childress is an elected member of the Institute of Medicine and an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is also a fellow of the Hastings Center.
He has been the Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. Professor of Christian Ethics at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University (1975-1979) and a Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago Divinity School and Princeton University. He received his B.A. from Guilford College, his B.D. from Yale Divinity School, and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Yale University.