School of Medicine
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Max Kasun
Research Professional, Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences
BioMax Kasun works in the Roberts Ethics Lab and Kim Ethics Lab at Stanford, which use empirical methods to help anticipate, clarify, and resolve ethical issues in modern biomedical research and clinical care. He received his BA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has interests in empirical and normative thought dedicated to increasing scientific understanding and societal appreciation of the nature, experience, and prevalence of mental illness and wellbeing.
Max has co-authored scientific, peer-reviewed articles and other scholarly work investigating ethical issues in research that involves human volunteers (e.g. authentic voluntarism in informed consent (National Institutes of Health; PI: Dr. Laura Weiss Roberts)), psychiatric ethics, medical education, public health, and neuroscience. His most recent contributions to NIH-funded scientific work (National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences; PI: Dr. Jane Kim) have focused on investigating ethical issues encountered in the design, development, and clinical integration of artificial intelligence, e.g., how environmental and cognitive factors shape appraisals of AI tools, clinical judgments, trust, and health decision-making.
Max's interests in academic medicine were informed by exposure to the interdisciplinary and uniquely vocative field of the public humanities. Before joining Stanford, he worked concurrently at the Consortium of Humanities Centres and Institutes and the UW Center for the Humanities – both directed by Sara Guyer (Irving and Jean Stone Dean, Division of Arts & Humanities, UC-Berkeley). He specializes in questions bearing on scientific integrity and intent, and in open questions regarding how the manner in which human expertise is routinely recruited by institutions (e.g. ideas of justice, action, obligation, intent, and capability), cognitive and affective sciences, and philosophy of mind (e.g. embodiment and personhood). A central theme yielded from his empirical work is that new strategies are needed to illuminate and defend opportunities for health care advancement. Scientific, robustly ethical medical education and scholarship will refine and integrate conceptualizations of the wide range of conditions thought to shape human and ecological flourishing, e.g. ideas of suffering, interdependence, disease, pathology, adaptation, dysfunction, harm, benefit, community, and belonging.
Max is a co-author of several chapters in APA's Study Guide to DSM-5-TR (2024) including the chapters on bipolar and related disorders and personality disorders (American Psychiatric Association). He has published work in and provided editorial support for the peer-reviewed journal Academic Medicine (Oxford University Press) and for two works on the subject of trauma and crisis and related interventions, including a reference guide for providing mental health care to victims of state atrocity (United Nations, Springer). Previously, he served on leadership teams for the Stanford Mental Health Technology and Innovation Hub and Neurodiversity Project.
Max is currently working on developing a new Special Initiative of the Chair on Mental Health Care for Unhoused and Justice-Involved Persons (see https://med.stanford.edu/psychiatry/special-initiatives/mhuj.html). The initiative aims to bring together a community of scholars, public stakeholders, and health care professionals to advance more humane and participatory inquiry and health policy in service of a population that faces profound controversy, health stigma, and scientific neglect. The initiative aims to improve how science is communicated to the public and policy decision-makers and to develop more evidence-based, pragmatic, strengths-based, and trauma-informed approaches to mental health care for unhoused persons, including those who have experienced episodic or cyclical involvement in the criminal and civil justice systems.
