his story

S. Matthew Liao

Director of Center for Bioethics, Arthur Zitrin Professor of Bioethics, New York University

Matthew Liao is Arthur Zitrin Professor of Bioethics, Director of the Center for Bioethics, and Affiliated Professor in the Department of Philosophy at New York University. He is the editor of The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence (Oxford University Press, forthcoming) and the author of The Right to Be Loved (Oxford University Press, 2015); Philosophical Foundations of Human Rights (Oxford University Press, 2015), Moral Brains: The Neuroscience of Morality (Oxford University Press, 2016), and over 50 articles in philosophy and bioethics. He has given a TED talk in New York, a TEDx talk at CERN, and he has been featured in the New York Times, The Atlantic, The Guardian, the BBC, Harper’s Magazine, Sydney Morning Herald, Scientific American and other media outlets. He is the Editor-in-Chief for the Journal of Moral Philosophy, a peer-reviewed international journal of moral, political and legal philosophy.

Dr. Liao provides an education grounded in a broad conception of bioethics encompassing both medical and environmental ethics. He offers the opportunity to explore the intersection of human rights practice with central domains of public health and regularly teaches normative theory and neuroethics. His courses address how the rightness or wrongness of an act is determined and ethical issues arising out of new medical technologies such as embryonic stem cell research, cloning, artificial reproduction, and genetic engineering; ethical issues raised by the development and use of neuroscientific technologies such as the ethics of erasing traumatic memories; the ethics of mood and cognitive enhancements; and moral and legal implications of “mind-reading” technologies for brain privacy.