Jason Adam Wasserman is Professor in the Department of Health Humanities and Bioethics at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry, where he serves as director of education and as a member of the clinical ethics consultation service. His work spans bioethics, pediatric ethics, the ethics of clinical decision-making, and the medical humanities.
His research addresses some of the most contested terrain in contemporary clinical ethics: the proper limits of conscientious objection in medicine, the meaning and application of the best-interest standard in pediatric practice, standards for decision-making in disorders of consciousness, advance care planning, and the normative dimensions of physician-patient communication. A recurring concern across this work is the relationship between abstract ethical principles and the specific clinical situations in which those principles are tested.
Wasserman's scholarship on medicine and the Holocaust examines how the history of medical atrocity has shaped — and continues to shape — the foundations of bioethics and research ethics, with particular attention to questions of human dignity. He has contributed chapters to major edited volumes on this topic and taught related material in both medical school and graduate contexts.
A significant strand of Wasserman's work addresses medical education, with particular attention to professionalism and core competencies in academic medicine. He has written on how medical schools should respond to unprofessional behavior among trainees, including a widely read piece in the New England Journal of Medicine developing a "just culture" framework for remediation. He has also examined the ethical dimensions of professional identity formation, the pedagogy of place-based learning, and the competencies required of students entering medical training.
He is a frequent collaborator with Mark Christopher Navin (Oakland University) and Abram Brummett (Oakland University William Beaumont School of Medicine), among colleagues in pediatric medicine, philosophy, and law. His work appears in Pediatrics, JAMA Pediatrics, the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of Medical Ethics, The Hastings Center Report, the Journal of Clinical Ethics, and the American Journal of Bioethics, among other venues.
He completed his doctoral training in sociology with a concentration in medical sociology, and he brings that disciplinary background to bear on questions that might otherwise be treated as purely philosophical. He is attentive to the social and institutional conditions under which ethical reasoning occurs, and he thinks those conditions matter for how ethics should be done.
