Matthew Wynia is board certified in internal medicine and infectious diseases, with additional training in public health and health services research. He led the Institute for Ethics at the American Medical Association in Chicago for 15 years, working nationally and internationally on issues related to professionalism and the social roles of physicians. In 2015, he moved to Colorado to become the director of the University of Colorado’s Center for Bioethics and Humanities (CBH). The CBH is involved in the education of all health professional students at CU; facilitates clinical ethics case consultation for hospitals on the Anschutz Medical Campus; carries out a research agenda to better understand the complex ethical challenges facing medicine and society; runs the annual Aspen Ethical Leadership Program; and carries out a variety of community engagement programs, such as the annual Holocaust, Genocide and Contemporary Bioethics program and the Hard Call® podcast series.
Dr. Wynia has led national projects on issues including public health and disaster ethics; ethics and quality improvement; communication, team-based care and engaging patients as members of the team; and medicine and the Holocaust. He has served on numerous committees and panels for the National Academy of Medicine, the Joint Commission, and others, including service on the Blue Ribbon panel that examined changes to the ethics policies and structures of the American Psychological Association following that group’s involvement in the Bush Administration’s coercive interrogation (torture) program.
He has delivered more than two dozen named lectures and visiting professorships and is the author of more than 150 published articles, co-editor of several books, and co-author of a book on fairness in health care benefit design. Among other leadership roles, he is a past president of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities, and past chair of the Ethics Forum of the American Public Health Association and of the Ethics Committee of the Society for General Internal Medicine.
Matthew Wynia joined Physicians for Human Rights as a first-year medical student in 1986, the year the organization was founded. As a second-year medical student, he traveled to the then-Soviet Union on a “Citizen Diplomacy” mission with Physicians for Social Responsibility.