Jonathan D. Moreno (born June 11, 1952) is an American philosopher and historian who specializes in the intersection of bioethics, culture, science, and national security, and has published seminal works on the history, sociology and politics of biology and medicine.
His father, Jacob Levy Moreno, was a psychiatrist and the pioneer of psychodrama and sociometry, the precursor of social network theory.
Moreno's doctoral dissertation traced the development of a distinctly American semiotic tradition from Charles Sanders Peirce to Nelson Goodman.
[citation needed] He was the founding director of the Program in Medical Humanities and a professor of pediatrics and medicine at the SUNY Health Science Center in Brooklyn from 1989 until 1998, when he joined the University of Virginia faculty as the Emily Davie and Joseph S. Kornfeld Professor of Biomedical Ethics and director of the Center for Biomedical Ethics.
[4] In 2007, Moreno joined the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania as part of President Amy Gutmann's Penn Integrates Knowledge (PIK) Initiative, where he is the David and Lyn Silfen University Professor and a professor of medical ethics and health policy and of the History and Sociology of Science.
[8] Moreno has served as senior staff member or adviser to many governmental and non-governmental organizations on bioethics, embryonic stem cell research, national defense research, and neuroscience, including three U.S. presidential commissions,[9][10] the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
His most recent books are Everybody Wants to Go to Heaven but Nobody Wants to Die: Bioethics and the Transformation of Healthcare in America,[16][17] co-authored with former Penn president Amy Gutmann, and The Brain in Context: A Pragmatic Guide to Neuroscience,[18] written with neuroscientist Jay Schulkin.