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Hastings Center News

New Hastings Center Fellows Elected

The Hastings Center is pleased to announce the election of eight new Fellows. Hastings Center Fellows are a group of individuals of outstanding accomplishment, whose work has informed scholarship and/or public understanding of complex ethical issues in health, health care, life sciences research and the environment.

Alireza Bagheri, MD, PhD, is assistant professor of medicine and medical ethics in School of Medicine, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Iran. He is also the vice-chairman of the UNESCO International Bioethics Committee, leading a working group on organ donation, transplantation, and trafficking. He also serves as a member of the board of directors of the International Association of Bioethics and the ethics committee of The Transplantation Society. Dr. Bagheri has studied and taught bioethics in Iran, Japan, Belgium, the United States and Canada, which strengthened his understanding of bioethics in a global context. As a palliative care physician, he brings extensive clinical experience to bioethical discussions as well as promoting close attention to the socio-cultural context especially in clinical decision-making.

I. Glenn Cohen, JD, professor of law at Harvard Law School and faculty director of the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law, Policy, Biotechnology & Bioethics. Cohen is one of the world’s leading experts on the intersection of bioethics and the law, as well as health law. He was the youngest professor on the faculty at Harvard Law School when he joined the faculty in 2008, at age 29, and when he was tenured as a full professor in 2013. He is currently one of the key co-investigators on a multimillion dollar Football Players Health Study at Harvard which is committed to improving the health of NFL players. He leads the Ethics and Law initiative as part of the multimillion dollar NIH-funded Harvard Catalyst, the Harvard Clinical and Translational Science Center program. He is also one of three editors-in-chief of the Journal of Law and the Biosciences, published by Oxford University Press.

Dena S. Davis, JD, PhD, holds the Endowed Presidential Chair in Health, Humanities & Social Sciences at Lehigh University. Her work focuses primarily on issues in genetic research, Alzheimer’s disease, reproductive technology and genetics, and decision-making at the end of life. Current projects include a book on genetic taboos; an edited book on the ethical, legal, social, and medical implications of human egg freezing. She has been a Fulbright scholar in India, Indonesia, Israel, Italy, and Sweden. Davis has been a member of the Committee on Bioethics of the American Academy of Pediatrics and currently serves on the National Institutes of Health Human Embryonic Stem Cell Eligibility Working Group, and the Central IRB of the National Cancer Institute. Her most recent book is Genetic Dilemmas: Reproductive Technology, Parental Choices, and Children’s Futures.

Walter Glannon, PhD, is a professor of philosophy at the University of Calgary. He is an international expert on the topic of the brain and neuroethics. He explores the ethical, legal, and psychological implications of neuroscience from a broadly philosophical perspective.  He examines how brain imaging, drug therapy, and different forms of psychosurgery for mental and neurological disorders can influence judgments about free will and moral and legal responsibility, as well as personal identity and the notion of the self-drawing from sources in neuroscience, bioethics, law, literature, philosophy, and psychology. He is the author or editor of six books and dozens of articles on the topic of the brain and neuroethics.

Jodi Halpern, PhD, is a professor of bioethics and medical humanities in the School of Public Health and Joint Medical Program at the University of California, Berkeley. She is also director of the advisory board of the Institute for Personality and Social Research at Berkeley. As a psychiatrist with a background in philosophy, she investigates how emotions and the imagination shape the health care decisions of clinicians and patients. The longstanding focus of her work has been on clinical empathy. Her most recent book is From Detached Concern to Empathy: Humanizing Medical Practice.

Barron H. Lerner, MD, PhD, is a professor of medicine and population health at the New York University School of Medicine. He has published extensively in scholarly journals and contributes essays to the New York Times Science section and the Well blog, Slate, Atlantic.com, and The Huffington Post. His latest book is The Good Doctor: A Father, a Son and the Evolution of Medical Ethics, published in 2014. A previous book, The Breast Cancer Wars: Hope, Fear and the Pursuit of a Cure in Twentieth-Century America, received the William H. Welch Medal of the American Association for the History of Medicine and was named one of the 26 most notable books of 2001 by the American Library Association.

Kathleen E. Powderly, CNM, PhD, is director of the John Conley Division of Medical Ethics and Humanities at the SUNY Downstate Medical Center. She joined the Downstate faculty in 1989, and holds faculty appointments in the College of Medicine.  A nurse-midwife with an MPhil and PhD in sociomedical sciences, she is a clinical ethicist and the ethics consultant to University Hospital of Brooklyn and Kings County Hospital Center.  Dr. Powderly is a Fellow of the New York Academy of Medicine and has been an adjunct associate at The Hastings Center.

Annette Rid, MD, is a senior lecturer in bioethics and society in the Department of Social Science, Health & Medicine at King’s College London. She also is an affiliated research fellow at the Institute of Biomedical Ethics, University of Zurich, and a member of the working group to revise the International Ethical Guidelines for Biomedical Research Involving Human Subjects of the Council for International Organizations of Medical Science (CIOMS), established by the World Health Organization and UNESCO. Her research interests include research ethics, clinical ethics, justice in health and health care, and public health ethics.