Bioethics is an interdisciplinary field by nature. But despite the overwhelming range of disciplines bioethics covers, “the tension between law, public health, and ethics is not a problem to be solved—it’s a productive space where crucial insights emerge,” says Michael Menconi (’20SPS), a graduate of Columbia’s Master of Science in Bioethics and Master of Public Health Dual-Degree Program.
Menconi is currently practicing as a corporate health care attorney at one of the country's top law firms, advising hospitals and health care and life sciences organizations on complex issues arising at the intersection of legal and regulatory requirements, ethics, and public health.
“What’s been most interesting is that many of the most complex issues I counsel clients on are not purely legal questions—they involve questions of institutional responsibility, equity, and trust,” Menconi said. “The dual-degree program gave me a language and framework for engaging with these issues in a way that is both rigorous and practical.”
Menconi spoke to SPS about his work in bioethics and how the dual-degree program prepared him to address the complex, evolving ethical challenges in healthcare.
Can you tell us about the sort of bioethical topics you deal with?
Much of my work touches on the distribution of risk and responsibility within healthcare systems. I often deal with questions about how healthcare organizations make decisions within an extremely complex and ever-changing regulatory environment, while ensuring such institutions honor their ethical commitments to the patients and communities they serve.
This includes counseling clients on integrating emerging technologies into care delivery. For example, I help clients in the AI space navigate the FDA's regulatory framework for AI-based medical devices, which healthcare providers and organizations are increasingly using to assist physicians in diagnosing and treating disease. This work, in addition to navigating regulatory complexity, involves addressing hard questions about the role of AI in patient care and diagnosis, as well as the interaction of AI technology with the professional/clinical roles of physicians and providers.
As part of my corporate transactional work, I have enjoyed representing financially distressed safety-net hospitals in their mergers with, or acquisitions by, public hospital systems. This work involves fascinating legal, regulatory, and political challenges that I approach with confidence thanks to my training in the M.S. in Bioethics and M.P.H. dual-degree program.
Five years out of the program, what lessons from your time at Columbia still guide your work today?
One is the importance of interdisciplinary humility—the idea that no single discipline, including law, has a monopoly on moral authority or problem-solving. The program trained me to become comfortable with ambiguity and to recognize that legal and ethical reasoning requires multidisciplinary fact-gathering and analysis.
Another enduring influence is the program’s emphasis on structural thinking and intellectual curiosity. Rather than focusing on individual decision-makers, the program pushed us to examine systems, incentives, and power dynamics. That perspective continues to shape how I approach institutional problems today, especially when thinking about equity, access, and accountability.
In your last conversation with SPS, you mentioned a desire to reimagine therapeutic law. Can you share an update on this?
That idea has continued to evolve and deepen in my practice. What I’ve come to appreciate is that law functions as a form of moral architecture within healthcare institutions. It shapes behavior, priorities, and culture, whether intentionally or not.
My goal remains to consider how legal frameworks can be designed or interpreted to support ethical care rather than merely mitigate risk. That means using law not just defensively, but proactively and constructively, as a tool to protect patient autonomy, enable clinicians to practice human-centered care, and create spaces for ethical deliberation within organizations.
In practical terms, this manifests in how policies are drafted, how compliance programs are structured, and how institutions respond to ethically fraught situations. It’s less about creating a new doctrine and more about integrating bioethical reasoning into the everyday legal operations of healthcare systems.
With so many industries now looking to generative AI for novel solutions, do you see a place for AI in the field of Bioethics?
I do—but cautiously and deliberately. AI has real potential to support bioethics, particularly in areas such as policy analysis, scenario modeling, and pattern identification in institutional decision-making. It can help surface ethical blind spots or inconsistencies that might otherwise go unnoticed.
At the same time, AI raises profound ethical concerns of its own—around bias, accountability, transparency, and the erosion of human judgment. In bioethics, especially, we need to be careful not to outsource moral reasoning to systems that lack moral agency.
I see AI’s most productive role as augmentative rather than substitutive: supporting human ethical deliberation, not replacing it. It is also crucial to ensure that bioethics be part of shaping how AI is deployed in healthcare, as opposed to being addressed retrospectively.
What guidance would you offer incoming dual-degree students now, given your perspective from working in the field?
I would encourage students to embrace the discomfort of interdisciplinarity. The tension between law, public health, and ethics is not a problem to be solved—it’s a productive space where crucial insights emerge.
Second, I’d advise students to think early about the institutional context. Bioethics looks different in academia, government, healthcare delivery, industry, and law. Understanding where you want to work—and how ethical reasoning actually functions in those settings—will help you translate theory into impact. It is also important to note that bioethics is as much about listening and interpretation as it is about argument. The program equips you with extraordinary tools; the challenge is learning when and how to use them in real-world settings where the answers are rarely obvious.
About the Program
Columbia University’s Master of Science in Bioethics grounds students in interdisciplinary approaches and models to address pressing bioethical challenges such as stem-cell research and health-care reform. The program prepares students to act as responsible and responsive leaders in this new and ever-growing field. It also includes a concentration in global bioethics—the first of its kind in the U.S. Columbia’s Bioethics program offers a range of degrees and courses.
