2017 Alumni Achievement Award Winner
Benjamin Simon Wilfond ’81
Alumni Achievement in Medicine - Bioethics
Benjamin Simon Wilfond is a pediatric pulmonologist and bioethicist. He is currently a professor and
chief of the division of bioethics and palliative care, Department of Pediatrics, University of
Washington School of Medicine. Wilfond is the founding director of the Treuman Katz Center of
Pediatric Bioethics at the Seattle Children’s Hospital. In addition, in 1998, he established the bioethics
research program at the National Human Genome Research Institute, where he worked until 2006.
As a national leader in bioethics, he has helped move bioethics from the margins into the mainstream
of professional education, medicine, clinical research and policy. He regularly consults with clinicians
and researchers that face challenging issues. He is nationally recognized for his research on ethical,
social and policy issues related to children with disabilities, genetic testing, genetic research and
pediatric research and he has written more than 250 papers.
At Muhlenberg, he was a philosophy and biology major but spent most of his time in the theatre. He
was on the founding board of the Muhlenberg Theatre Association (MTA) in 1978, as
