Hastings Center News

Hastings Center Recognizes Ezekiel J. Emanuel and Christine Grady with 2026 Bioethics Founders’ Award

Ezekiel J. Emanuel, MD, PhD, and Christine Grady, RN, PhD, have been named recipients of the 2026 Bioethics Founders’ Award. The award, given annually by The Hastings Center for Bioethics, recognizes individuals from around the world who have made substantial, sustained contributions to bioethics in ways that have advanced thinking and practice in medicine, the life sciences, and public policy.

Hastings Center President Vardit Ravitsky will present the awards at the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities (ASBH) annual conference in Indianapolis in October.

“Zeke and Christine are preeminent bioethics leaders whose visionary work has charted the course of the field for decades,” said Ravitsky. “In addition, they have been generous and wise mentors of scholars early in their careers, many of whom have risen to leadership positions and carry their wisdom forward.”

Ezekiel J. Emanuel

Ezekiel J. Emanuel, MD, PhD, is Vice Provost of Global Initiatives, the Diane v.S. Levy and Robert M. Levy University Professor, and Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where he also holds appointments in the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy in the Perelman School of Medicine and the Department of Health Care Management in the Wharton School, and co-directs the Healthcare Transformation Institute. He was the founding Chair of the Clinical Center in the Department of Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health (1997-2011) and founding Chair of the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy at the Perelman School of Medicine (2011-2020).

Emanuel’s impact on national and global bioethical policy has been enormous. He was instrumental in drafting the Affordable Care Act in his role as Special Advisor for Health Policy to the Director of the Office of Management and Budget and National Economic Council under President Barack Obama. He also served on the Transition Covid Advisory Board under President Joe Biden and on the National Bioethics Advisory Commission under President Bill Clinton. He has served as a Special Advisor to the Director General of the World Health Organization since 2019.

Emanuel has published more than 350 journal articles and book chapters and has authored or edited 16 books. The themes in these works include powerful ethical examinations of and proposals for allocating healthcare resources, research with human participants, healthcare organizations, and national healthcare policy. His work is among the most cited in bioethics. He is also prominent in the media addressing these and other bioethical topics.

Emanuel has been elected to the American Philosophical Society, National Academy of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Association of American Physicians, and the Royal College of Medicine in the U.K., and he is an elected Hastings Center Fellow. His many honors related to bioethics include the Dan David Prize Laureate in Bioethics, the AMA-Burroughs Wellcome Leadership Award, the Public Service Award from the American Society of Clinical Oncology, the Lifetime Achievement Award of the American Society of Bioethics and Humanities, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s David E. Rogers Award, Roosevelt University’s President’s Medal for Social Justice, the John Mendelsohn Award from the MD Anderson Cancer Center, and the Patricia Price Browne Prize in Biomedical Ethics from the University of Oklahoma School of Medicine.

Christine Grady

In March 2026, distinguished nurse and bioethicist Christine Grady, RN, PhD, was named Senior Advisor on Bioethics and Neuroethics to Georgetown University’s Executive Vice President for Health Sciences and a professor in the School of Medicine, with additional appointments in the Kennedy Institute of Ethics and the Pellegrino Center for Clinical Bioethics. Grady spent most of her outstanding career at the Clinical Center in the Department of Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health, where she was a senior staff bioethicist (1996-2025), tenured investigator (2004-2025), and chair of the Department of Bioethics (2012-2025).

Grady was a member of President Barack Obama’s Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues (2010-2017). Her many extramural boards and committees include Vice Chair and Board Member of Public Responsibility in Medicine and Research (2013-2019), Board Member (2011-2014) and Secretary (2014-2016) of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities, and member of the Greenwall Foundation’s Faculty Scholars Program Committee (2019-2025) and its Bernard Lo Award Committee (2022-present).

Grady is a widely published author, with more than 240 journal articles and more than 40 book chapters, along with seven authored or edited books. Her publications have been recognized for their distinctive and important contributions to bioethics, including clinical research ethics, informed consent, nursing ethics, and HIV disease. Four of her co-edited books focus on ethical and regulatory issues in clinical research, nationally and internationally, with pertinent cases. Her 2018 book Moral Distress in the Health Professions (co-edited with C. Ulrich) features a theme—moral distress—that is also prominent in her book Nurses and COVID-19: Ethical Considerations (co-edited with C. Ulrich, 2022), which addresses a wide range of ethical issues confronted by nurses during the pandemic.

Grady has received numerous awards and honors for her contributions to bioethics. She was recognized with the University of Chicago’s MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics Prize (2023), the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities’ Lifetime Achievement Award (2019), and Nursing Outlook’s Excellence in Practice Award (2020). She is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine and an elected Fellow of the American Academy of Nursing and of The Hastings Center.

Learn more about the Bioethics Founders’ Award, including a list of all the recipients.