Event Type
Webcast
Lecture
Topic
Basic Health Sciences
Location
Online
CUSP Speaker Series | Charles Binkley
Event Date
Thursday, October 8, 2026, 6:00 - 8:00pm EDT
Event Location
Online
Event Contact
Columbia Undergraduate Scholars Program
Contact Phone
2128546378
When a patient tells their story, something therapeutic happens in the telling, yet modern medicine increasingly compresses that story into data, and artificial intelligence now proposes to write its next chapter. AI systems can predict a patient’s future: their risk of dementia, of dying, of harming themselves. But to what extent do such predictions become reality, and are there predictions medicine should not make, or should not make without asking for consent? Drawing on sources from Hippocratic case histories to contemporary clinical AI, this talk asks whether artificial intelligence is simply the newest instrument in medicine’s long evolution, or whether it fundamentally alters the human connection at the heart of healing. Who gets to narrate our story, and who gets to author our future?
Charles E. Binkley, MD, FACS, HEC-C is Director of AI Ethics and Quality at Hackensack Meridian Health and Professor of Surgery at Hackensack Meridian School of Medicine. He is Chair of the School of Medicine’s AI Task Force and the Faculty Assembly, as well as the health system’s Clinical AI Champions Group. He is also a Lecturer in Bioethics at Columbia University.
Dr. Binkley is a nationally recognized expert in medical artificial intelligence and translational bioethics. He serves as an advisor for local and national organizations, including the Greater New York Hospital Association, the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, the American College of Surgeons, the Society of University Surgeons, the Association of American Medical Colleges, and The Hastings Center for Bioethics.
He received his medical degree from Georgetown University School of Medicine, where he was elected to Alpha Omega Alpha, and completed his surgical training at the University of Michigan.
Dr. Binkley’s scholarly work focuses on the ethical integration of AI into clinical care, with particular emphasis on clinical decision-making, AI implementation, professional responsibility, and accountability for harm. His work has been published in The New England Journal of Medicine, Nature Medicine, JAMA Surgery, Annals of Surgery, The Journal of the American College of Surgeons, The American Journal of Bioethics, Hastings Center Report, npj Digital Medicine, and The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, among others. He is the author of Encoding Bioethics: AI in Clinical Decision Making.