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Nir Eyal Named First Bergen Chair in Biomedical Ethics

The Rutgers Board of Governors appointed Nir Eyal, a bioethicist whose renowned work in population-level bioethics focuses on health inequalities, health promotion, and research ethics, as the first holder of the Dr. and Mrs. Stanley S. Bergen Jr. Chair in Biomedical Ethics.

In his research, Eyal, director of the Center for Population-Level Bioethics in the Institute for Health, Health Care Policy, and Aging Research, addresses bioethical issues arising from the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as health care rationing in resource-poor settings, critical health-worker shortages, disaster response, universal health coverage and ethics in HIV and emerging-infection trials.

The endowed chair was created to honor, retain or recruit eminent scholars in the field of biomedical ethics for service on the faculty with proceeds from a life insurance policy for Dr. Stanley S. Bergen Jr., the former president of the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey.

Eyal arrived at Rutgers in 2019, after 13 years on the faculty of the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health and Harvard Medical School, as the Henry Rutgers Professor of Bioethics in the School of Public Health. He is the founding director of the Center for Population-Level Bioethics, which is dedicated to questions in ethics and health that arise in public policy.

He is the co-editor of the Oxford University Press series Population-Level Bioethics and has received multiple National Institutes of Health awards. He has authored more than 100 peer-reviewed papers and has earned support for his research from agencies such as the National Science Foundation and from foundations such as Open Philanthropy.

Eyal’s appointment begins July 1, 2024.