Felicia Cohn, PhD

Kaiser Permanente

Titles and Affiliations: 

  • Bioethics Director for Kaiser Permanente, Orange County
  • Clinical Professor of Bioethics in the Department of Medicine at the University of California, Irvine School of Medicine.

Dr. Cohn has served on several ethics committees since 1990 and is currently co-chair of the Bioethics Committee at Kaiser Permanente, Orange County, and serves on the Ethics Committee at the University of California, Irvine Medical Center.  Her current work involves clinical ethics consultation, policy development, and ethics education.  She was elected President of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities 2013-2015, and continued on the Board as Past President though 2017.  She guided efforts to explore quality improvement and credentialing processes for clinical ethicists.  She received her Masters and PhD in Religious Ethics from the University of Virginia.

Dr. Cohn’s publications have focused on clinical ethics consultation, end-of-life care, family violence, patient safety, and medical education and have appeared in JAMA, the Hastings Center Report, and the Journal of Clinical Ethics, among other journals. She co-edited The Ethics of Bioethics: Mapping the Moral Landscape, which was published in 2007.  Previously she directed and published a study for the Institute of Medicine, National Academies of Science, entitled Confronting Chronic Neglect: The Education and Training of Health Professionals to Respond to Family Violence.  Prior to that, she directed the Program in Medical Ethics and was a Senior Scientist with the Center to Improve Care of the Dying at The George Washington University, where she co-authored a brief to the US Supreme Court on physician-assisted suicide, provided testimony before Congress on end-of-life care, and contributed to The Handbook for Mortals and other publications on death and dying.