Dominic A. Sisti

Director, Scattergood Program for Applied Ethics in Behavioral Health Care
Assistant Professor of Medical Ethics & Health Policy; Assistant Professor of Psychiatry; Assistant Professor of Philosophy

Dominic Sisti, PhD, directs the Scattergood Program for the Applied Ethics of Behavioral Health Care and is an assistant professor in the Department of Medical Ethics & Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania. He holds secondary appointments in the Department of Psychiatry, where he directs the ethics curriculum in the residency program, and the Department of Philosophy. Dr. Sisti examines ethical and policy challenges in mental health care, including long-term psychiatric care for individuals with serious mental illness and clinical ethics issues in correctional settings. He studies and teaches a course on the ethical implications of AI and social media in mental health care. Sisti’s research also explores ethical issues in psychedelic research and clinical application.

Dr. Sisti’s writings have appeared in peer-reviewed journals such as JAMA, JAMA Psychiatry, Psychiatric Services, the Hastings Center Report, and the Journal of Medical Ethics. His scholarship has been featured by popular media outlets such as the New York Times, The Economist, NPR, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Slate, and The Atlantic. He is editor of three books: Health, Disease, and Illness: Concepts in Medicine (with Arthur Caplan & James McCartney, Georgetown University Press, 2004), The Case of Terri Schiavo: Ethics at the End of Life (with Arthur Caplan & James McCartney, Prometheus Books, 2006), and Applied Ethics in Mental Healthcare: An Interdisciplinary Reader (with Arthur Caplan & Hila Rimon-Greenspan, MIT Press, 2013).

Sisti was an Edmund Pellegrino Fellow at the Center for Clinical Bioethics at Georgetown University. He received his bachelor’s degree in biology from Villanova University, a master of bioethics from the University of Pennsylvania, and his doctorate in philosophy from Michigan State University. His research has been funded by the Thomas Scattergood Behavioral Health Foundation, the Greenwall Foundation, The Quattrone Center for the Fair Administration of Justice, the Leonard Davis Institute, and the Dana Foundation. Dr. Sisti teaches graduate courses on clinical ethics, ethics in behavioral health care, and social media, ehealth, and biomedical ethics.