Prof. Kahn has served on numerous state and federal advisory panels. He was most recently chair of National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Board on Health Sciences Policy, and previously chaired its committee on the Use of Chimpanzees in Biomedical and Behavioral Research (2011); the committee on Ethics Principles and Guidelines for Health Standards for Long Duration and Exploration Spaceflights (2014); and a committee on the Ethical, Social, and Policy Considerations of Mitochondrial Replacement Techniques (2016).  He also formerly served as a member of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee.

In addition to committee leadership and membership, Prof. Kahn is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine and an elected Fellow of The Hastings Center.  He was also the founding president of the Association of Bioethics Program Directors, an office he held from 2006-2010.

Prof. Kahn is a co-principal investigator with Berman Institute faculty member Gail Geller, ScD, MHS, on GUIDE: Genomic Uses in Infectious Disease and Epidemics, an NIH-funded project to study the largely unexplored ethical, legal and social implications (ELSI) of genomics as applied to infectious disease.

Prof. Kahn’s publications include Contemporary Issues in Bioethics; Beyond Consent: Seeking Justice in Research; Ethics of Research With Human Subjects: Selected Policies and Resources; The Oxford Handbook of Public Health Ethics (editor); Digital Contact Tracing for Pandemic Response (editor);  as well as more than 125 scholarly and research articles.  He also speaks widely across the U.S. and around the world on a range of bioethics topics, in addition to frequent media outreach.  From 1998-2002 he wrote the bi-weekly column Ethics Matters on CNN.com. In 2023, he served as executive producer of a bioethics podcast, playing god?

Prior to joining the faculty at Johns Hopkins, Prof. Kahn was Director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Minnesota.