James Giordano, Ph.D., serves as the Vice President of Brain, Mind and Healing Research at the Samueli Institute and oversees the Institute’s Basic Science Research Program. He is a neuroscientist, medical philosopher and ethicist whose 20-year career has focused upon mechanisms of pain, analgesia, and the philosophic and ethical basis of pain medicine, clinical neurology, psychiatry and integrative medicine. He is Scholar in Residence at the Center for Clinical Bioethics, and Associate Professor in the Department of Palliative Medicine at Georgetown University Medical Center, Washington, DC and a Visiting Fellow of Harris Manchester College, University of Oxford, and a scholar of the Oxford Roundtable in Science and the Humanities. Dr. Giordano is a Visiting Fellow of the John P. McGovern M.D. Center for Health, Humanities and the Human Spirit at the University of Texas Health Sciences Center, Houston, TX and was an American Psychological Association Visiting Fellow at the Athinoula Martinos Center for Neuroimaging, Massachusetts General Hospital/ Harvard Medical School. Dr. Giordano completed a NIEHS post-doctoral fellowship in neuropathology and neurotoxicology at the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore MD, and received his post-graduate training in bioethics at the Neiswanger Institute of Bioethics and Health Policy of Loyola University, IL. He received his doctoral degree in biological psychology, with distinction, from the City University of New York, where he also was awarded MS and M.Phil. degrees. Dr. Giordano received an MA in physiological psychology from Norwich University, Vermont and a BSc in physiological psychology, cum laude, from St. Peter's College, NJ.