Hastings Center fellows certificate

Hastings Center News

12 Outstanding Scholars Recognized for Work in Ethics of Disability, Transplantation, Mental Health Care, and Other Areas  

The Hastings Center is pleased to announce the election of 12 new fellows. Hastings Center fellows are a group of more than 200 individuals of outstanding accomplishment whose work has informed scholarship and public understanding of complex ethical issues in health, health care, science, and technology. The new fellows focus on a broad range of topics, including disability and justice, legal history of the American eugenics movement, gender and reproductive medicine, transplantation, ethics consultation, theological ethics, global health and research ethics, mental health care, and dilemmas posed by neurological impairments.

Jennifer Blumenthal-Barby, PhD, MA, is the Cullen Professor of Medical Ethics and associate director of the Center for Medical Ethics and Health Policy at Baylor College of Medicine. She is a philosopher bioethicist whose research focuses primarily on decision-making and ethics. She has been principal investigator on four awards from the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute to study and improve decision-making in advanced heart failure. She has also received funding as principal investigator from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality to study adding an AI/machine learning system that predicts personalized risks to a patient decision aid. She is a co-PI on a study of ethics and decision-making in pediatric deep brain stimulation, funded by the National Institutes of Health’s BRAIN initiative. She is the author of Good Ethics and Bad Choices: The Relevance of Behavioral Economics for Medical Ethics (MIT Press). Blumenthal-Barby is launching and leading a multi-institutional Philosophical Bioethics Consortium in partnership with The Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, The Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University, the New York University Center for Bioethics, and Rice University. The consortium is creating an online hub with resources to promote conceptual and normative work in the field of bioethics. https://jenniferblumenthalbarby.wordpress.com/

Denise M. Dudzinski, PhD, HEC-C is professor in the departments of bioethics and humanities and pediatrics in the division of bioethics and palliative care at the University of Washington School of Medicine  She was chair of the department of bioethics and humanities from 2014 to 2022. She directs UW Medicine’s Ethics Consultation Service and the Organizational Ethics Service at Seattle Children’s Hospital. She was a member of the board of directors at the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities and has served on two ASBH task forces to update the Core Competencies in Healthcare Ethics Consultation. She is on the editorial boards of the American Journal of Bioethics and Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics. Dudzinski co-edited Complex Ethics Consultations: Cases that Haunt Us (Cambridge University Press).  She teaches bioethics to health care providers as well as medical, nursing, and graduate students. Her scholarship addresses ethical issues in transplantation and mechanical circulatory support, clinical and organizational ethics, methods and practices in ethics consultation, pandemic ethics, largescale adverse event disclosure, competent refusal of nursing care, moral distress, and ethical issues in end-of-life care. https://depts.washington.edu/bhdept/denise-m-dudzinski-phd-hec-c

Emily A. Largent, PhD, RN, is the Emanuel and Robert Hart Assistant Professor of Medical Ethics & Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, and she holds a secondary appointment at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Her research examines ethical and regulatory issues arising in human subjects research, with a particular focus on Alzheimer’s disease research. Her work is supported by grant awards from the National Institute on Aging. She is a member of the Greenwall Faculty Scholars Program class of 2023 and the 2023 recipient of the Baruch A. Brody Award and Lecture in Bioethics. Her work has been published in leading bioethics and biomedical journals, including the Hastings Center Report, American Journal of Bioethics, New England Journal of Medicine, and JAMA. She is co-author of Clinical Research Ethics Consultation: A Casebook (Oxford University Press). https://medicalethicshealthpolicy.med.upenn.edu/faculty-all/emily-largent

Paul A. Lombardo, PhD, JD, MA, is the Regents’ Professor and Bobby Lee Cook Professor of Law at Georgia State University. He is a lawyer and a historian. Lombardo has published extensively on topics in health law, medico-legal history, and bioethics. He is best known for his work on the legal history of the American eugenics movement. He served from 2011 to 2016 as a senior advisor to the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues. He is an elected member of the American Law Institute and a fellow of the American Bar Foundation. In 2021 he received the Jay Healey Health Law Professor of the Year, from the American Society of Law, Medicine, & Ethics, and in 2019 he was named a Fulbright Specialist. He testified as an expert witness in Lowe v. Atlas, a landmark federal genetic discrimination case, and his work was cited in a 2019 U.S. Supreme Court opinion, (Kristina Box, Commissioner, Indiana Department of Health, et al. v. Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky, Inc., et al (587 U.S.). His books include: Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court and Buck v. Bell (Johns Hopkins University Press) and A Century of Eugenics in America: From the Indiana Experiment to the Human Genome Era (Indiana University Press). He was also an editor for three editions of Fletcher’s Introduction to Clinical Ethics.   https://law.gsu.edu/profile/paul-lombardo/    

Anne Drapkin Lyerly, MD, MA, is a professor of social medicine, research professor of obstetrics and gynecology, and core faculty in the Center for Bioethics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A board-certified obstetrician-gynecologist and a bioethicist, she studies ethically complex issues around gender and reproductive medicine. She cofounded the Second Wave Initiative, an effort to ensure that the health interests of pregnant people are fairly represented in biomedical research and in drug and device policies. She is PI on two projects funded by the National Institutes of Health: the PHASES Project, which addresses the ethics of HIV research and pregnancy, and the PREPARE Project, which is examining the ethics of research engaging pregnant adolescents. She was co-PI on the Wellcome Trust-funded PREVENT project on research, pregnancy, and public health emergencies. Lyerly is an alumna of the Greenwall Foundation’s Faculty Scholars Program and Fellowship in Bioethics and Health Policy. She chaired the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists Committee on Ethics and has served as an advisor for organizations including the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, National Institutes of Health, and the World Health Organization. She is author of A Good Birth (Penguin Random House). https://www.med.unc.edu/socialmed/directory/anne-lyerly/

Debjani Mukherjee, PhD, HEC-C, is an associate professor of medical ethics in clinical medicine and clinical rehabilitation medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine and a senior clinical ethicist at New York Presbyterian Weill Cornell Medical Center. She is a clinical-community psychologist with expertise in qualitative methods and a clinical ethicist who has been involved in over 750 ethics consultations. Her scholarship and practice are informed by more than 30 years of clinical experience working in nine hospitals in New York City; Buffalo.; Boston; Urbana, Ill.; Chicago, Paris, and Kolkata in several roles, including psychometrist, brain injury support group facilitator, psychotherapist, researcher, ethics consultant, and director of an ethics program. Her scholarly interests are in the ethical dilemmas posed by neurological impairments, the emotional impact of medical decisions, the practice of clinical ethics consultation, and ethical concerns in rehabilitation medicine. https://vivo.weill.cornell.edu/display/cwid-dem9199

Thaddeus Pope, JD, PhD, HEC-C, is a professor at Mitchell Hamline School of Law. A former Fulbright Chair and Brocher Foundation researcher, he uses the law both to improve medical decision-making and to protect the rights of patients at the end of life. He works to balance liberty and public health; to assure adequate informed consent; and to develop fair internal dispute resolution mechanisms. His topics of research include medical futility, advance directives, aid in dying, VSED, ethics committees, and brain death. He explores these issues in nearly 250 publications in leading medical journals, law reviews, bar journals, nursing journals, bioethics journals, and book chapters. He is a coauthor of  the The Right to Die: The Law of End-of-Life Decisionmaking (Wolters Kluwer), the definitive textbook on the subject, and he runs the Medical Futility Blog, which has had nearly five million page views since it was initiated in 2007. Pope’s engagement with health law and bioethics goes beyond academic scholarship. He bridges thought and action with amicus briefs, legislative testimony, and professional organization policy statements. https://thaddeuspope.com/

Peter Reese, MD, PhD, is professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine. He a transplant nephrologist, bioethicist, clinical trialist, and an advocate for equitable health care. He is a leader in research on transplantation, in empirical and conceptual work on the applied ethics of transplantation, and in mentoring trainees and junior faculty working on the ethical dimensions of transplantation. He has received research awards from the American Society of Nephrology and the American Society of Transplantation. In 2011, he received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government to early-stage scientists. More recently, he was elected to the American Society of Clinical Investigation. He served as chair of the ethics committee and on multiple other policy-making committees for the United Network for Organ Sharing – the organization responsible for U.S. organ transplantation policy, providing fundamental ethics guidance related to a range of problems, including refinement of the organ allocation system and the treatment of living organ donors. His research has often combined ethics and epidemiology to demonstrate that, with a robust informed consent process, many patients can benefit from transplantation using organs that were previously discarded, such as organs from donors with hepatitis C virus infection. https://www.med.upenn.edu/apps/faculty/index.php/g275/p6153261

Joel Michael Reynolds, PhD,  is an assistant professor of philosophy and disability studies at Georgetown University, a senior research scholar in the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, a senior advisor to The Hastings Center, and a faculty scholar of The Greenwall Foundation. He is the founder of The Journal of Philosophy of Disability and co-editor of Oxford Studies in Disability, Ethics, and Society, a book series from Oxford University Press. At the broadest level, his work examines foundational issues at the intersection of ethics, biomedicine, and society. He is especially concerned with the meaning of disability, the issue of ableism, and how philosophical inquiry into each might improve the lives of people with disabilities and the justness of practices in medicine, science, politics, and law. Reynolds is the author or co-editor of The Life Worth Living:Disability, Pain, and Morality (University of Minnesota Press) and The DisabilityBioethics Reader (Routledge) and three forthcoming books–The Art of Flourishing: Conversations on Disability, Technology, and Belonging (Oxford University Press, 2023), The Meaning of Disability (Oxford University Press, 2024), and Philosophy of Disability: An Introduction (Polity, 2024). In 2020, he co-edited a Hastings Center special report, “For All of Us? On the Weight of Genomic Knowledge.” Reynolds regularly speaks with medical students and practitioners across specialties concerning how to improve the quality and equity of care for patients with disabilities. https://gufaculty360.georgetown.edu/s/contact/0031Q00002G0rLMQAZ/joel-michael-reynolds

Seema K. Shah, JD, is an associate professor in pediatrics at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and the Founder’s Board Professor of Medical Ethics and director of research ethics at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago. She is an expert in the fields of pediatrics and global health research ethics, as well as on ethical issues in the determination of death.  Shah was previously on faculty at the University of Washington’s Seattle Children’s Hospital and at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center Department of Bioethics. Shah chaired an NIH committee on ethical considerations in conducting Zika virus human challenge trials, consulted with the World Health Organization on ethical guidance for human challenge trials, and lectured on the ethics of clinical research at around the world.  Her research is focused on the following question: When is it ethically and legally acceptable to expose some people to risk for the benefit of others? She has examined this question in different domains, including HIV/AIDS research, pediatric research, and the ethics of human challenge trials. https://www.feinberg.northwestern.edu/faculty-profiles/az/profile.html?xid=42926

Dominic Sisti, PhD, is an associate professor in the department of medical ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania. He directs the Scattergood Program for the Applied Ethics of Behavioral Health Care and holds secondary appointments in the department of psychiatry, where he directs the ethics curriculum in the residency program, and in the department of philosophy. He examines ethical and policy challenges in mental health care, including long-term psychiatric care for individuals with serious mental illness and clinical ethics issues in correctional settings. Sisti’s research also explores ethical issues in psychedelic research and clinical application. His writing has appeared in medical and bioethics journals such as JAMAJAMA PsychiatryPsychiatric Services, the Hastings Center Report, and the Journal of Medical Ethics. He is co-editor of three books, including Applied Ethics in Mental Healthcare: An Interdisciplinary Reader (MIT Press).  https://medicalethicshealthpolicy.med.upenn.edu/faculty-all/dominic-sisti  

Patrick T. Smith, PhD, is an associate research professor of theological ethics and bioethics and a senior fellow at the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University. Along with his work in the Divinity School, Smith is the director of the bioethics program for the Trent Center for Bioethics, Humanities, and History of Medicine and associate professor in population health sciences in the department of health sciences at Duke University School of Medicine. His current research and writing are in the areas of moral philosophy, bioethics, theological ethics, end-of-life care, and religious social ethics. He was named one of the 2016-17 Henry Luce III Fellows in Theology and in 2022 received the Pellegrino Medal in health care ethics. Smith was a lecturer at Harvard Medical School in the department of global health and social medicine and served as core faculty for the Master of Bioethics program. He also worked professionally for eight years as the ethics coordinator for Angela Hospice Care Center in Livonia, Mich. During some of that time he served on the Ethics Advisory Council of the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization and as a board member for the Hospice Palliative Care Association of Michigan.  https://divinity.duke.edu/faculty/patrick-smith