Hastings Center News
Hastings Center Welcomes 2025 Fellows
The Hastings Center for Bioethics is pleased to announce the election of the 2025 Fellows. Hastings Center Fellows are a group of about 300 individuals of outstanding accomplishment whose work has informed scholarship and public understanding of complex ethical issues in health, health care, science, and technology.
“Our new Fellows are addressing some of the most urgent issues of our time, including reproductive ethics, transplant research, and public health, and are working throughout the world,” said Hastings Center President Vardit Ravitsky. “We are thrilled to have them join our community.”
“The newly elected Fellows bring innovative insights and interdisciplinary expertise that will advance the Center’s mission and contribute to programs such as the Summer Bioethics Program for Undergraduates and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) Global Bioethics Mentorship Program, initiatives that aim to shape the future of bioethics leadership worldwide,” said Faith Fletcher, Chair of the Fellows Council.
The 2025 Hastings Center Fellows are:
Emily E. Anderson, PhD, MPH, is a professor at the Neiswanger Institute for Bioethics at Loyola University Chicago. Her areas of interest and expertise include the ethics of community engaged research; researcher and physician professionalism and misconduct; ethical issues in research with vulnerable populations; informed consent; institutional review board quality and effectiveness; and the application of qualitative research techniques to the study of research ethics. She serves as associate editor for Narrative Inquiry in Bioethics and is a member of the PRIM&R Board of Directors. She is the principal investigator of the Loyola University Chicago-Ukrainian Catholic University International Bioethics Training Program, which provides doctoral education in research ethics to scholars and professionals from Ukraine. The aim is to train a critical mass of bioethics experts who will hold positions of scholarship and leadership in health research institutions in Ukraine and who will be instrumental in providing direction on research ethics. https://www.luc.edu/stritch/bioethics/aboutus/facultydirectory/profiles/andersonemilye.shtml
Brandon Brown, PhD, is a professor in the Department of Social Medicine, Population and Public Health at the University of California, Riverside School of Medicine. His primary research interests are in facilitating community partnered research and the ethical issues in HIV-related research. He is also chair of the board of directors of TruEvolution, which advocates for health equity and racial justice for LGBTQ+ people. The National Academy of Medicine selected him as one of its 2021 Emerging Leaders in Health and Medicine Scholars. He is a faculty advisor for the Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation program of the National Science Foundation. With over 200 academic publications, he is an author of the HIV Prevention Trials Network 2020 updated ethics guidance document and was a consultant on the National Academy of Medicine report, “Improving Representation in Clinical Trials and Research.” https://profiles.ucr.edu/app/home/profile/brandonb
Jean Cadigan, PhD, is a professor in the Department of Social Medicine and a core faculty member in the Center for Bioethics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She studies the ethical, legal, and social implications of genomic research and its translation to clinical care. Her recent work has examined governance challenges in biobanking and in human genome editing research, and she is currently co-PI of a study investigating ethical issues associated with the use of polygenic scores for social traits. She has also conducted research aimed at improving clinical ethics education for medical trainees. She serves on the leadership team for UNC’s Center for the Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications of Biotechnology. https://www.med.unc.edu/socialmed/directory/jean-cadigan/
Felicia Cohn, PhD, HEC-C, is the bioethics director of Kaiser Permanente, Orange County, in California. Previously, she directed the medical ethics education program at the UC Irvine School of Medicine, where she maintains a faculty appointment as a clinical professor of bioethics in the Department of Medicine. She is co-editor of The Ethics of Bioethics: Mapping the Moral Landscape. Cohn directed a study for the Institute of Medicine, “Confronting Chronic Neglect: The Education and Training of Health Professionals to Respond to Family Violence.” She was president of ASBH from 2013 to 2015 and has served other leadership positions. She was the founding chair of the HealthCare Ethics Consultant Certification Commission in 2017 and guided the launch of a certification program for healthcare ethics consultants in 2018. https://icer.org/who-we-are/people/felicia-cohn-phd/
Nadav Davidovitch, MD, MPH, PhD, is an epidemiologist and a public health physician. He is a professor and the inaugural director of the newly established Center for Health Solutions and Social Impact at Bar Ilan University in Israel, chair of the health policy program at the Taub Center for Social Policy Research, and chair of the Israeli Public Health Forum. He served until recently as the director of the School of Public Health at Ben Gurion University of the Negev. He is also affiliated with the schools of public health at University of Toronto and the University of Illinois Chicago. His current research concerns health policy, health inequities, health and immigration, vaccination policy, environmental health, and public health history and ethics. He is head of the public health emergency task force of the Association of the Schools of Public Health in the European Region (ASPHER) and he serves on several international and national committees, including the Executive Committee of the European Public Health Association. https://www.taubcenter.org.il/en/team/nadav-davidovitch/
Neal Dickert, MD, PhD, is a professor of medicine and the Thomas R. Williams Professor in the Division of Cardiology at the Emory University School of Medicine. A major focus of his work is on clinical research ethics. He has expertise in ethical aspects of research in acute care contexts where informed consent is either impossible or very difficult. Another major focus is on processes for shared decision-making in cardiology. He is an alumnus of the Greenwall Faculty Scholars in Bioethics Program, a past recipient of the Public Responsibility in Medicine and Research Pillars of PRIM&R award, a faculty member of the American College of Cardiology, and a past Greenwall Fellow in Bioethics at the National Academy of Medicine. He is a member of the AHRQ Learning Community on shared decision-making, the SIREN Network human subjects working group, and multiple data safety and monitoring committees overseeing multicenter clinical trials. He was a member of the Secretary’s Advisory Committee on Human Research Protections. https://med.emory.edu/directory/profile/?u=NJR
Lisa Harris, MD, PhD, is the George E. Wantz Professor of Interdisciplinary Enrichment in Medicine, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology, and a professor of women’s and gender studies at the University of Michigan. She is also director of Michigan Medicine’s interdisciplinary Center for History, Humanities, Arts, Social Sciences, and Ethics in Medicine. Her scholarship and public voice in reproductive health, rights, and justice have made her a national and international thought leader in a range of areas, including conscience and abortion, race and social class stratification of reproduction, and the role of doctor in depolarizing contested issues. She is the recipient of many awards, including the Bernard Lo Award in Bioethics and the Association of Reproductive Health Professional’s Preserving Core Values in Science Award, and is a three-time recipient of the Society of Family Planning’s Outstanding Researcher Award. https://lsa.umich.edu/content/michigan-lsa/wgs/en/people/faculty-affiliated-by-courtesy/lhharris.html
Quill Kukla, PhD, is a professor of philosophy and disability studies at Georgetown University, as well as a fellow at the SOCRATES Centre for Advanced Studies at Leibniz University Hannover in Germany. Kukla’s research interests include bioethics (such as health communication ethics, reproductive ethics, and the ethics of biomedical and public health research); theories of agency and autonomy; philosophy of health, medicine, and disability; the management and communication of risk and uncertainty; and the social epistemology of health research. From 2003 to 2005, they were a Greenwall Fellow in Bioethics and Health Policy at Johns Hopkins University. Kulka is the editor-in-chief of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal. https://gufaculty360.georgetown.edu/s/contact/00336000014RxaGAAS/quill-r-kukla
Monica R. McLemore, PhD, RN, MPH, is a visiting professor at NYU Rory Meyers College of Nursing and is a noted scholar of antiracist birth equity research and national expert on reproductive health, rights, and justice. McLemore has distinguished herself as a scientist and clinical nurse. Her work advancing understanding of reproductive health and justice has been cited in varied ways across many platforms, including eight amicus briefs to the U.S. Supreme Court and in the media, including PoliticoandScientific American, as well as the Peabody Award-winning HBO series “Random Acts of Flyness.” She is editor-in-chief of the journal Health Equity. Among her many awards, McLemore was recognized as the Society of Family Planning’s Mentor of the Year and honored with the American Public Health Association’s Outstanding Leadership and Advocacy Award for her work on maternal child health. https://nursing.nyu.edu/directory/faculty/monica-rose-mclemore
Stephanie Morain, PhD, is a faculty member at the Berman Institute of Bioethics and an associate professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Bloomberg School of Public Health. She conducts both empirical and normative research into issues at the intersection of clinical research, public health, and health policy. Her work focuses on two key areas: ethical and practical challenges presented by the integration of research and care and issues related to women’s reproductive health. https://bioethics.jhu.edu/people/profile/stephanie-morain-phd-mph/
Brendan Parent, JD, is an associate professor in the Division of Medical Ethics with joint appointment in surgery at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine, and he is director of transplant ethics and policy research. He directs millions of grant dollars to study ethics and regulation of transplant research, artificial intelligence in healthcare, and replacing nonhuman animals in research. Parent is also an independent living donor advocate, an advisory board member for the National Kidney Foundation, and a member of the national leadership council for The Organ Donation and Transplantation Alliance. He provides ethics consultation for transplant programs across the globe. Parent’s current work also focuses on ethics challenges surrounding determination of death by neurologic criteria and research on the deceased. He has published academic articles in journals, including Nature, NEJM, JAMA, and Science. https://med.nyu.edu/faculty/brendan-parent
Toby Schonfeld, PhD, is the executive director of the National Center for Ethics in Health Care at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, a position she assumed in 2020 after having served as deputy executive director from 2016 to 2018. She is also the immediate past president of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities. In between Veterans Affairs assignments she directed Prime Review Board, where she was responsible for the oversight, maintenance, and improvement of the human research protection program. She began her government service at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, where she was the human subjects research review official from 2014 to 2016. She spent the first part of her career in academic medicine, first at the University of Nebraska Medical Center and then at Emory University, where she also directed the Master of Arts in Bioethics program. She is co-editor (with D. Micah Hester) of Guidance for Healthcare Ethics Committees. https://www.ethics.va.gov/about/staff/index.asp
Kayte Spector-Bagdady, JD, MBE, is the George E. Wantz Professor of Bioethics at the University of Michigan Medical School. She is also the director of Michigan Bioethics, which won the 2022 American Society for Bioethics and Humanities Cornerstone Award, and is an associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology. The overarching goal of her work is improving the governance of secondary research with health data and specimens to increase the accessibility of data and generalizability of advances. She is an associate editor of the American Journal of Bioethics. She has served as a member of the National Academies’ committee on newborn screening; chair and lead author of the American Heart Association’s “Principles for Health Information Collecting, Sharing, and Use;” and a member of the ASBH Board of Directors. She was an American Society of Law, Medicine & Ethics Health Law Scholar in 2019 and is a 2024 Greenwall Faculty Scholar. Before joining the University of Michigan, she was an associate director of President Obama’s Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues. Her recent articles have been published in the Hastings Center Report, New England Journal of Medicine, Science, JAMA, and Nature Medicine. https://medschool.umich.edu/profile/1737/kayte-spector-bagdady
