Winston Chiong
University of California, San Francisco, Memory and Aging Center and UCSF Bioethics
AI welfare Whatever the metaphysics, uncertainty already creates obligations
Winston Chiong, MD, PhD, is Professor of Neurology in the Memory and Aging Center at the University of California, San Francisco, and Director of UCSF Bioethics, where he leads the Decision Lab. Trained as both a clinical cognitive neurologist and an analytic philosopher (PhD, NYU; MD, UCSF), he investigates how neurodegenerative diseases, closed-loop neurostimulation, and emerging artificial intelligence challenge clinical and philosophical criteria for autonomy, personhood, and moral standing.
In November 2026, Chiong delivers the featured David Kopf Lecture on Neuroethics at the Society for Neuroscience Annual Meeting (Neuroscience 2026) in Washington, D.C., titled What Can Neuroscience Reveal About Human Values?. His address examines how conversational AI systems that mimic human reasoning force neuroscience to clarify the biological and affective underpinnings of valuation, care, and subjective meaning in both healthy brains and patients with frontotemporal dementia or Alzheimer’s disease.
Chiong is placed in the Welfare and Moral Status cohort on this site because his clinical and philosophical work bridges empirical neural markers with practical ethical obligations toward vulnerable minds whose capacities for self-report are impaired, altered by neural implants, or contested across substrates.
Known for. Clinical neuroethics of dementia, deep brain stimulation and agency, 2026 Society for Neuroscience David Kopf Lecture on Neuroethics ('What Can Neuroscience Reveal About Human Values?')
Coverage on this site
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Winston Chiong is listed with the other welfare and moral status researchers, who hold that whatever the metaphysics, uncertainty already creates obligations. The positions themselves are set out in the index of consciousness theories. Every researcher covered on this site is indexed in the directory of consciousness researchers.