Bruce Jennings is director of bioethics at the Center for Humans and Nature, a private operating foundation that studies philosophical, ethical, and policy questions that arise at the intersection of public health, the environmental/ecological sciences, and democratic theory and practice. He teaches at the Yale University School of Public Health, serves as a senior advisor at The Hastings Center, and is a member of the ethics advisory committee of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A political scientist by training, Jennings is a graduate of Yale University (B.A. 1971) and Princeton University (M.A. 1973).
Jennings served as executive director of The Hastings Center from 1991 through 1999, and he directed several research projects on the care of the dying, health policy, chronic illness and long-term care, and ethical issues in human genetics. He became an elected Fellow of The Hastings Center in 2007.
Jennings has been a consultant to several governmental and private organizations. He also serves on the boards of directors and/or on ethics advisory committees for several national and professional organizations.
He has written and edited twenty books and has published over one hundred articles on bioethics and public policy issues. He is currently completing a book on dementia and the ethics of long-term care. Future projects include a book on public health and political theory; a study of the relationship between the concept of nature and the concept of culture in modern social philosophy; and a book on social justice and the moral imagination as understood through the medium of fiction and social interpretation.