Fins is also a member of the adjunct faculty of Rockefeller University and has served as Associate for Medicine at The Hastings Center.
In October 2010, Fins was elected a member of the Institute of Medicine (IOM) of the United States National Academies.
Fins' scholarship in medical ethics and health policy has focused on palliative care, rational approaches to ethical dilemmas and the development of "clinical pragmatism" as a method of moral problem-solving drawing upon the American pragmatic tradition of William James and John Dewey.
He is a recipient of a Soros Open Society Institute Project on Death in America Faculty Scholars Award, a Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation Visiting Fellowship and a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Investigator Award in Health Policy Research.
He has served on the boards of the American Society of Bioethics and Humanities, the Fund for Modern Courts and Wesleyan University, where he is now a trustee emeritus.
[7] Fins also served as a member of New York's Attorney General's Commission on Quality Care at the End of Life and sits on a number of editorial boards, including the Journal of Pain and Symptom Management, The Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics, The Oncologist, BioMed Central Medical Ethics, Neuroethics and the Basic Bioethics Series of MIT Press.