Hastings Center News
Berlinger Elected Hastings Center Fellow
Nancy Berlinger, a senior research scholar at The Hastings Center, was elected a Hastings Center fellow on December 8, 2023.
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.
Berlinger has been a full-time research scholar at The Hastings Center since 2002. Her current scholarship and empirical research focus on ethical, societal, and global dimensions of population aging, with special attention to dementia care and to housing equity for older adults. She also studies ethical challenges in immigrant and community health, with attention to the role of policy in limiting or expanding health care for these populations. Other areas of longstanding interest include understanding problems of safety and harm in health care systems and developing guidance for health care professionals concerning end-of-life and crisis scenarios.
She founded and directs The Hastings Center’s Sadler Scholars initiative for doctoral students from underrepresented minority communities.
Berlinger is the author or co-author of three books: Are Workarounds Ethical? Managing Moral Problems in Health Care Systems (Oxford University Press, 2016), The Hastings Center Guidelines for Decisions on Life-Sustaining Treatment and Care Near the End of Life: Revised and Expanded Second Edition (Oxford University Press, 2013), and After Harm: Medical Error and the Ethics of Forgiveness (Johns Hopkins, 2005).
She received her PhD in English from the University of Glasgow; her MDiv from Union Theological Seminary, with a concentration in social ethics; and her BA in English and history from Smith College.