Alex John London

Director, Center for Ethics and Policy
K&L Gates Professor of Ethics and Computational Technologies, Philosophy

Bio

Alex John London is the K&L Gates Professor of Ethics and Computational Technologies, co-lead of the K&L Gates Initiative in Ethics and Computational Technologies at Carnegie Mellon University, Director of the Center for Ethics and Policy at Carnegie Mellon University, and Chief Ethicist at the Block Center for Technology and Society at Carnegie Mellon University. An elected Fellow of the Hastings Center, Professor London’s work focuses on ethical and policy issues surrounding the development and deployment of novel technologies in medicine, biotechnology and artificial intelligence, on methodological issues in theoretical and practical ethics, and on cross-national issues of justice and fairness. His book, For the Common Good: Philosophical Foundations of Research Ethics is available in hard copy from Oxford University Press and is available here in PDF as an open access title. His papers have appeared in Mind, The Philosopher’s Imprint, Science, JAMA, The Lancet, The BMJ, PLoS Medicine, Statistics In Medicine, The Hastings Center Report, and numerous other journals and collections. He is also co-editor of Ethical Issues in Modern Medicine, one of the most widely used textbooks in medical ethics.

Professor London is a member of the World Health Organization (WHO) Expert Group on Ethics and Governance of AI whose “Guidance on Large Multi-Modal Models” was published in 2024 and whose report, “Ethics and governance of artificial intelligence for health” was published in 2021. From 2022–2023 he was a member of the U.S. National Academy of Medicine Committee on Creating a Framework for Emerging Science, Technology, and Innovation in Health and Medicine, whose report "Toward Equitable Innovation in Health and Medicine: A Framework” was published in 2023. He is a conference program co-chair for the 6th AAAI / ACM Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Ethics and Society (AIES) and a member of the program committee for the 2023 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT) conference. He has served on previous program committees for AIE in 2021 and 2022 and from 2017-2019 he was a judge for the IBM Watson AI X-Prize. He is currently a co-leader of the ethics core for the NSF AI Institute for Collaborative Assistance and Responsive Interaction for Networked Groups (AI-CARING).

For more than a decade, Professor London has helped to shape key ethical guidelines for the oversight of research with human participants. He is currently a member of the U.S. National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB). From 2012-2016 he was a member of the Working Group on the Revision of CIOMS 2002 International Ethical Guidelines for Biomedical Research Involving Human Subjects.  Prior to that he was an expert commentator at three World Medical Association meetings for the revision of the 2013 Declaration of Helsinki.  From 2007-2018 he was a member of the Ethics Working Group of the U.S. HIV Prevention Trials Network where he was part of the group that drafted the HIV Prevention Trials Network Ethics Guidance for Research.  From 2016-2017 he was part of the U.S. National Academy of Medicine Committee on Clinical Trials During the 2014-15 Ebola Outbreak and in 2016 he was appointed to the U.S. Health and Human Services Advisory Committee on Blood and Tissue Safety and Availability. He has served as an ethics expert in consultations with numerous national and international organizations including U.S. National Institutes of Health, the World Health Organization (here, and here), the World Medical Association, and the World Bank.