Patrick T. Smith, PhD is an associate research professor of theological ethics and bioethics at Duke University Divinity School and an associate professor in population health sciences at Duke University School of Medicine. He is a Senior Fellow at the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke where he directs “Capacious Minds,” a program aligned with the university provost’s initiative on Free Inquiry, Pluralism, and Belonging. Prior to this role, he served as the director of the bioethics program at the Trent Center for Bioethics, Humanities, and the History of Medicine at the Duke School of Medicine from fall 2021 to spring 2025. He is President-Elect of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities and an associate editor of the American Journal of Bioethics.

Before coming to Duke, he was a lecturer at Harvard Medical School in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine. He served as core faculty for the Master of Bioethics program offered through Harvard’s Center for Bioethics. He also was a principal faculty member for the Initiative on Health, Religion, and Spirituality, an interfaculty initiative across Harvard University. Patrick also worked professionally for eight years as the ethics coordinator for Angela Hospice Care Center in Livonia, Mich. During some of that time he served on the Ethics Advisory Council for the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization and as a board member for the Hospice Palliative Care Association of Michigan.

 In his training as a philosopher, Patrick is especially committed to exploring the close and often forgotten links between bioethics, public health, community engagement, the arts, and the pursuit of health justice. He often considers and applies in his work how jazz music concepts might inform our approaches to ethics and our common life together.