Robert Baker, PhD
Director
The Union Graduate College - Mount Sinai School of Medicine
Bioethics Program

 
Professor of Bioethics
William D. Williams Professor of Philosophy, Union College

History of Medical Ethics/Bioethics
Professionalism/Codes of Ethics
International Bioethics/Human Rights
Bioethics Theory


A Bronx-born New Yorker, Robert Baker earned a BA with Honors in History from the City College of New York and a PhD in philosophy from the University of Minnesota. He has authored, co-authored, edited or co-edited several books and government reports, including the award-winning American Medical Ethics Revolution (Johns Hopkins, 1999). Baker has published in such journals as the American Journal of Bioethics, Cambridge Healthcare Quarterly, The Hastings Center Report, JAMA, The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, The Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal and Medical History. He co-edits two book series.

A four-time National Endowment for the Humanities awardee, Baker has been an American Philosophical Society fellow, an Institute for Health and Human Values fellow, an NYU FRN Scholar in Residence, a visiting scholar at the former Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine (London), a senior scholar-in-residence at the AMA Institute on ethics, and a College of Physicians of Philadelphia Wood Institute Fellow. He is also an on-going visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Bioethics. Founding chair of the Affinity Group on the History of Medical Ethics of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities, Baker serves on the American Philosophical Association’s Committee on Philosophy and Medicine and is a member of the American Association of Historians of Medicine and the International Association of Bioethics. In 2002, he was Hyderabad/Sind National Collegiate Board Visiting Professor at the University of Mumbai (India).


Cambridge Autobiography (pdf) >
Curriculum Vitae (word doc) >
NIH Biosketch (word doc) >


Recent Publications

Baker, Robert and McCullough, Laurence. 2007.
Medical Ethics’ Appropriation of Moral Philosophy:
The Case of the Sympathetic and Unsympathetic Physician.

Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal. 17 (1): 3-22. - Download pdf >

Baker, Robert. 2006.
Medical Ethics and Epidemics. In Ethics and Epidemics
Ed. John Balint, Sean Philpott, Robert Baker, and Martin Strosberg, pp. 93-134.
Amsterdam, Elsevier.
- download pdf >

Baker, Robert. 2005.
Getting Agreement: How Bioethics Got Started.
The Hastings Center Report.
35 (3), 50-51. - download pdf >

Baker, Robert. 2005.
A Draft Model Aggregated Code of Ethics for Bioethicists.

American Journal of Bioethics.
5 (5), 33-41. - View Article >

Baker, Robert. 2005.
International Bioethics and Human Rights:
Reflections on A Proposed Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights.

Politics and Ethics Review
1 (2), 188-196.

Recent Activities

AMA Writing Group on African Americans and Organized Medicine (with Elizabeth Jacobs, Ololade Olakanami, Todd Savitt, Harriett Washington, and Matt Wynia).

ASBH Advisory Committee on Ethics Standards (ACES): See various communications and reports including Baker, Robert; Kipnis, Kenneth; Pearlman, Robert and Taylor, Holly. 2006. Report and Recommendations of the ASBH Advisory Committee on Ethics Standards (ACES) - www.asbh.org >

Chair,
Rapaport Ethics Across the Curriculum Initiative, Union College: donor funded three-year educational reform initiative that will introduce 50 ethics segments in non-philosophy courses at Union College - ethics.union.edu >

Ethics During Epidemics, Bio-terrorism and Natural Disasters. Panel: Robert Baker (Chair), Dan Brock, Ezekiel Emanuel, and David Perlman. 103rd Annual Meeting of the American Philosophical Association, Washington DC, December 29, 2006.

Project Director:
NIH Fogarty Training Grant E-Education in Research Ethics:
Central and Eastern Europe
. Four year training grant offering Advanced Certificates in Research Ethics via on-line education to develop research ethics infrastructure in Central and Eastern Europe, including countries that were formerly part of the Soviet Union. - www.researchethicseurope.com >


 
     
E-mail: bakerr@union.edu
Phone: 518-388-6215
Fax: 518-631-9903
Union Faculty Page >