Julia Kolak is a Clinical Ethicist at the Montefiore Einstein Center for Bioethics and faculty at the Einstein Cardozo’s Master of Science in Bioethics as well as the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. She is the former Senior Medical Ethics Fellow and consultant at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and completed her PhD at the Graduate Center of New York (CUNY). Her work in the philosophy of science and normative bioethics is primarily focused on the limitations of biomedical knowledge and the jockeying of the limit–descriptively and normatively–of our scientific capabilities in medicine.  

Her dissertation explores these themes and the role of values in the demarcation of disease in general and mental disorders in particular, offering a new theoretical approach to psychiatric nosology and diagnostic classification. Moving away from the emphasis on etiology and dysfunction, this account seeks to articulate a new framework of harm reduction that goes beyond the determination or rejection of medical necessity as a medicolegal concept.  

While a Visiting Fellow at the Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics, she will expand this work to argue that the ethical justification of a clinical intervention is not exhausted by its narrow interface with the biological basis of a putative diagnostic category or disease entity. Most immediately, she is engaged with implications that follow from this claim in debates about the social determinants of health. Combining the methodology and research aims of empirical and normative bioethics, experimental philosophy, and the social sciences/medical humanities, she also aims to capture discrepancies in the conceptual use of important terms arising in psychiatry, clinical ethics consultations, and reproductive medicine.