Hastings Center News
Hastings Center Welcomes 24 New Fellows
The Hastings Center is pleased to announce the election of 24 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 come from six countries and a range of disciplines, including medicine, nursing, philosophy, law, American studies, and theater. Their research and other activities encompass diverse areas such as critical care medicine, conflicts of interests, clinical research ethics, genomics, artificial intelligence, philosophy of race, health equity, and social justice.
Laurie A. Badzek, LLM, JD, MS, RN, FNAP, FAAN, is dean and professor at Penn State’s Ross and Carol Nese College of Nursing. She specializes in genomics education and competency, health care ethics and law, nursing practice, and ethical decision-making. Badzek served as director of the American Nurses Association (ANA) Center for Ethics and Human Rights for over 18 years. She led two substantial revisions to the Code of Ethics for Nursing (2001, 2005) before stepping down in 2017. A tireless champion of using genomics in nursing to enhance patient care, Badzek was a principal investigator of one of the largest U.S. studies examining the translation of genomics to bedside care. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the International Society of Nurses in Genetics International Genomics Research Award, the American Society of Bioethics and Humanities Cornerstone Award and the ANA Leadership in Ethics Award. She is involved in the development of the Global Genomics Nursing Alliance (G2NA.org) and serves on its steering committee. She is also a steering member on the Chinese University of Hong Kong Asian Pacific Genomic and Genetic Nursing Centre. https://www.nursing.psu.edu/directory/badzek/
Mary Catherine Beach, MD, MPH, is a professor of medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and a core faculty member of the Berman Institute of Bioethics at Johns Hopkins. Dr. Beach has been a Greenwall fellow, a health policy fellow in the office of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, and a recipient of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Generalist Physician Faculty Scholar Award. Dr. Beach’s scholarship about respect and relationships in health care encompasses both empirical and conceptual dimensions. Her empirical work focuses primarily on respect and communication between patients and clinicians. For the last several years, most of Dr. Beach’s research has centered on people living with HIV/AIDS and sickle cell disease, and on how respect is conveyed (or not) in patient medical records. https://bioethics.jhu.edu/people/profile/mary-catherine-beach/
Nikola Biller-Andorno, Dr. med. Dr. phil., is a professor at the University of Zurich, where she directs the Institute of Biomedical Ethics and History of Medicine, a WHO Collaborating Centre for Bioethics. She co-leads the PhD program in biomedical ethics and law and serves as vice-president of the clinical ethics committee of the University Hospital Zurich. She is also a member of the Swiss National Research Council and the Swiss Academy of Medical Sciences. From 2009 to 2011 she served as president of the International Association of Bioethics. She has been a Commonwealth Fund Harkness Fellow (2012- 2013), a Safra Network Fellow (2013-2014) and a visiting professor of biomedical ethics at Harvard University (2012-2014). In 2016, she was elected as Fellow of the Collegium Helveticum, an Institute of Advanced Study sponsored by the University of Zurich, the Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, and the Zurich University of the Arts. https://www.ibme.uzh.ch/en/Biomedical-Ethics/Team/Chair-and-Secretariat/biller-andorno.html
Eric Campbell, PhD, is professor of medicine and director of research at the Center for Bioethics and Humanities at University of Colorado School of Medicine Anschutz. He is a survey scientist who conducts research at the intersection of health policy and bioethics. In recent years, Dr. Campbell’s research has focused on professionalism in medicine, conflicts of interest, medical aid-in-dying, equitable care for people with disabilities, and research integrity. His work has been supported by the National Institutes of Health and independent foundations including, the Greenwall Foundation and the Commonwealth Fund. His publications have appeared in JAMA, the New England Journal of Medicine, Annals of Internal Medicine, Health Affairs, and other leading medical and ethics journals. He serves regularly as a resource on bioethics and policy issues for leading media outlets including NPR, CBS, NBC, CNN, Time, the New York Times, Washington Post, and the Boston Globe. https://www.cuanschutz.edu/centers/bioethicshumanities/facultystaff/eric-g-campbell
Mildred Cho, PhD, is a professor in the Division of Medical Genetics of the Department of Pediatrics and in the Division of Primary Care and Population Health of the Department of Medicine at Stanford University. She is also associate director of the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics and director of the Center for Integration of Research on Genetics and Ethics. Dr. Cho’s major areas of interest are the ethical and social impacts of genetic research and its applications, including precision medicine, gene therapy, the human microbiome, and synthetic biology. Her recent interests include the implications of applying data science, artificial intelligence, and mobile technologies to genomic and health data. https://profiles.stanford.edu/mildred-cho?tab=bio
Bryan Doerries is a New York-based writer, director, and translator who currently serves as the artistic director of Theater of War Productions, a company that presents dramatic readings of seminal plays and texts to frame community conversations about pressing issues of public health and social justice. A self-described evangelist for ancient stories and their relevance to our lives today, Doerries uses age-old approaches to help individuals and communities heal from trauma and loss. His books include The Theater of War: What Ancient Greek Tragedies Can Teach Us Today (Knopf), The Odyssey of Sergeant Jack Brennan (Pantheon), All That You’ve Seen Here Is God (Vintage), and Oedipus Trilogy (Vintage). Among his awards, he has received an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Kenyon College, and in March 2017, he was named Public Artist in Residence for the City of New York. www.theaterofwar.com
Lisa Eckenwiler, PhD, is a professor of philosophy and, as of January 2022, philosophy department chair at George Mason University. Her research centers broadly on vulnerability and global structural health injustice. She has special interests in humanitarian health ethics, especially issues facing migrants. Some of her current projects focus on the ethical closure of humanitarian projects, a new theoretical framework for humanitarian health ethics (“an ethic of the temporary”), and a collection of case studies and original essays on migration and structural health justice. She also has a large body of work on the ethical significance of place for health justice. She is at work on a book tentatively entitled Placemaking for Health Justice. Her published books include Long-term Care, Globalization and Justice: Migrant Care Workers, Aging, and Families (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012) and The Ethics of Bioethics: Mapping the Moral Landscape, co-edited with Felicia Cohn (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007). Dr. Eckenwiler is a co-founder and current chair of the Resisting Borders network; a founding member of the Independent Resource Group for Global Health Justice; a member of the Humanitarian Health Ethics Network. She is a Collaborator with the Ethics and Health section at le Centre de Recherche en Éthiqueat the University of Montréal, and serves as Vice President of the International Association of Bioethics. https://philosophy.gmu.edu/people/leckenwi
Bernice Simone Elger, Dr. med, MA, is a professor at the University of Basel, where she directs the Institute for Biomedical Ethics (IBMB), and a professor in the Center for Legal Medicine at the University of Geneva. She is the president of the XVI World Congress of Bioethics and she served as President of the Swiss Bioethics Society in 2018. She has published widely in medical and ethical journals on many topics, including ethics in genetics, clinical ethics, paternalism and autonomy in medicine, care at the end of life, and the ethics of research involving biobanks and human tissue, as well as about human rights questions related to medical ethics in correctional health care. In 2010, she was awarded the Swiss prize for research in primary care. Her other awards include the University of Geneva’s Prix Bizot for her work on biobanks, the Award of the Medical Faculty for her doctorate about medical paternalism, and the Prix Arditi en éthique for her work on predictive medicine. https://ibmb.unibas.ch/en/persons/bernice-simone-elger/cv-of-prof-dr-med-bernice-simone-elger/
Holly Fernandez Lynch, JD, MBE, is an assistant professor of medical ethics in the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy at the Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, with a secondary appointment as an assistant professor of law. Professor Fernandez Lynch’s scholarship focuses on clinical research ethics and regulation, access to investigational medicines outside clinical trials, Food and Drug Administration policy, and the ethics of gatekeeping in health care. She is the founder and co-chair of the Consortium to Advance Effective Research Ethics Oversight, a group working to evaluate and improve IRB effectiveness. Professor Fernandez Lynch served as a member of the Department of Health and Human Services Secretary’s Advisory Committee on Human Research Protections from 2014 to 2019. She currently serves on the boards of Public Responsibility in Medicine and Research (PRIM&R) and the American Society for Law, Medicine, and Ethics. She was a Greenwall Faculty Scholar in 2019 and received the inaugural Baruch A. Brody Award in 2020. https://medicalethicshealthpolicy.med.upenn.edu/faculty-all/holly-fernandez-lynch
Jill A. Fisher, PhD, is professor of social medicine and core faculty in the University of North Carolina Center for Bioethics. Her scholarship and teaching interests center upon how social inequalities are produced or exploited by commercialized medicine in the United States. Dr. Fisher’s NIH-funded research examines how clinical trials are conducted and who participates in them as researchers and human subjects. In her 2009 book Medical Research for Hire (Rutgers University Press), she shows how clinical trials have become a revenue stream for physicians and an important source of medical “care” for uninsured patients. Her more recent work has explored healthy volunteers’ participation in clinical trials. Her 2020 book Adverse Events (NYU Press) analyzes healthy volunteers’ participation in drug trials through the lenses of stigma and social inequality. Dr. Fisher has also published on the social construction of Munchausen syndrome, tattooing as a cultural practice, gender and science, hospital tracking and location technologies, nonhuman animal research, and qualitative methods. https://www.jillfisher.net
Faith Fletcher, PhD, MA, is an assistant professor in the Center for Medical Ethics and Health Policy at Baylor College of Medicine, and a senior advisor to The Hastings Center. Nationally, Dr. Fletcher is contributing to critical conversations around health equity, structural racism, medical mistrust, and trustworthiness. Her integrated public health and bioethics research agenda investigates the health care and research experiences of traditionally marginalized populations to inform ethically grounded and community-centered strategies. Dr. Fletcher received training through Fordham University’s HIV Research Ethics Training Institute and is a contributor to the American Public Health Association’s new Code of Public Health Ethics. She is the outgoing co-chair of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities RACE Affinity Group, a national special interest group committed to promoting bioethics discourse and collaboration around social and structural disadvantage. In 2017, Dr. Fletcher was named one of the National Minority Quality Forum’s 40 under 40 Leaders in Health for her commitment to improving access to scientific research and quality health care for minoritized populations. This prestigious award acknowledges the next generation of leaders primed to reduce health inequities. https://www.bcm.edu/people-search/faith-fletcher-72936
Ann Gallagher, PhD, is head of nursing and professor of care education, ethics, and research at University of Exeter in the U.K. and a visiting scholar at the National Center for Bioethics in Research and Health Care at Tuskegee University in Alabama. She is also a working group member of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics in-depth inquiry on the Future of Ageing. Her research areas include dignity in residential care, innovative approaches to ethics education in elder care, ethics and professional regulation, virtue ethics, love in professional life, professionalism in paramedic practice, and compassion in care. An international leader in ethics as applied to nursing and care, she is committed to professional education, innovation, scholarship, and research that enables individuals, families and communities to flourish. She is a Fellow of the Royal College of Nursing, a Fulbright Scholar, and editor-in-chief of the international journal Nursing Ethics. She is author of over 170 publications, including six books, most recently Slow Ethics and the Art of Care (Emerald Insight, 2020). https://medicine.exeter.ac.uk/people/profile/index.php?web_id=Ann_Gallagher
Anthony Ryan Hatch, PhD, associate professor and chair of the science and society program at Wesleyan University. He teaches, conducts research, and lectures widely on health systems, medical technology, and social inequalities. Dr. Hatch is the author of Silent Cells: The Secret Drugging of Captive America (Minnesota, 2019) and Blood Sugar: Racial Pharmacology and Food Justice in Black America (Minnesota, 2016). In addition to his research, scholarly writing, and teaching, Dr. Hatch is the founding director of Black Box Labs, a research and training laboratory that introduces students to qualitative research methods through faculty-student-community research collaborations. The goal of the lab is to use the methodological insights of science and technology studies to advance just science and social justice. He has been involved in supporting Wesleyan’s Center for Prison Education and sustainability and environmental justice pedagogy. https://www.wesleyan.edu/academics/faculty/ahatch/profile.html
Anita Ho, PhD, MPH, is a bioethicist and health services researcher with training and experience in philosophy, clinical and organizational ethics, public health, and business. She is the Northern California regional director of ethics for Providence, a bioethics faculty member at both University of British Columbia and the University of California, San Francisco, and a scientist at the Centre for Health Evaluation and Outcomes Science in Canada. An international scholar with more than 70 publications, she is particularly interested in systemic and social justice issues arising in health care, domestically and internationally. Her current research focuses on ethical dimensions of utilizing innovative and artificial intelligence in health care, research and trial design ethics, supportive decision-making, and end-of-life decisions. She is completing a book for Oxford University Press on the ethics of using artificial intelligence in health monitoring. https://www.spph.ubc.ca/person/anita-ho/
Ping Jia, MA, is founder of the Health Governance Initiative, a nonprofit organization and civic think tank focusing on scientific public health, law, and policy. He is a senior research fellow at the Bioethics Institute at Renmin University in Beijing; a senior research fellow at the Center for the Study of Bioethics at Huazhong University of Science and Technology in Wuhan; and vice president of Chinese Society for Bioethics. Since 2007, he has been Asia Society’s Asia 21 fellow. Since 2009, he has been a Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum. He has written extensively on law, public policy, and social affairs related to public health, biomedicine, and scientific research in China. He drafted the first nationwide compensation plan for blood transfusion-related HIV/AIDS in China in 2011. Since 2014, Jia has helped develop annual satellite sessions on ethics, law, and social problems for China’s National Academy Plenary on HIV/AIDS and other infectious diseases sponsored by United Nations and the Chinese government. Jia provided numerous policy recommendations and reports on combating Covid-19, including health system reformation, disease tracking, access to vaccines, and an ethical framework for human challenge trials in China. Jia is an advisory committee member of the Ministry of Science and Technology on National Emergency Management and Scientific Ethics.
Alexander A. Kon, MD, HEC-C, FAAP, FCCM, is the medical director of the pediatric intensive care unit and inpatient pediatrics at Community Children’s and chair of the Department of Women’s and Children’s Services at Community Medical Center in Missoula, Mont. He is also a voluntary clinical professor of pediatrics and affiliate faculty in the Department of Bioethics and Humanities at the University of Washington School of Medicine. He is a pediatric intensivist and bioethicist, and has held numerous national leadership positions, including serving as the president of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities, chair of the ethics committee of the Society of Critical Care Medicine, and lead of the U.S. Military Health System Healthcare Ethics Working Group. Dr. Kon’s work focuses primarily on decision-making for critically ill infants, children, and adults. Dr. Kon introduced the concept of informed nondissent, in which doctors bear the burden of making difficult choices when surrogates prefer to cede authority. This novel concept has been endorsed by major health care organizations and is being adopted nationally. Alexander Kon MD, FAAP, FCCM – Community Children’s (communitychildrens.org)
Douglas J. Opel, MD, MPH, is an associate professor in the Department of Pediatrics and an adjunct associate professor in the Department of Bioethics and Humanities at the University of Washington School of Medicine. He is also interim director of the Treuman Katz Center for Pediatric Bioethics at Seattle Children’s Research Institute and past director of clinical ethics at Seattle Children’s Hospital. Dr. Opel’s research interests include provider-parent communication, medical decision-making, and public health ethics, with a primary goal of his research being to improve child health by optimizing pediatric decision-making and the provider-parent relationship.He has participated in several national interdisciplinary efforts to address vaccine confidence, public trust in vaccines, and vaccine mandates. Dr. Opel currently sits on the Vaccine Confidence Subcommittee of the Department of Health and Human Services’ National Vaccine Advisory Committee, as well as the Lancet Commission on Vaccine Refusal Acceptance, and Demand in the United States. He also served on the American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Bioethics from 2015 to 2021. Dr. Opel has published articles on pediatric and bioethical issues in major journals, and his work has been featured in major media outlets such as NPR, The New Yorker, and the Los Angeles Times. Douglas J. Opel MD MPH, UW Seattle Children’s Profile
Quayshawn Spencer, PhD, is the Robert S. Blank Presidential Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania. He specializes in metaphysical issues in the philosophy of science, philosophy of biology, and philosophy of race. Some major issues he’s published on are what is the nature of a biologically real object, what is the nature of a scientifically real object, what is the nature of U.S. race talk, and whether there exists any biological racial classification that is useful in medical research. His most recent book is What Is Race? Four Philosophical Views (Oxford University Press, 2019) https://philosophy.sas.upenn.edu/people/quayshawn-spencer
Daniel Fu-Chang Tsai, MD, PhD, is a professor in the Graduate Institute of Medical Education and Bioethics at National Taiwan University College of Medicine, an attending physician in the Department of Medical Research at National Taiwan University Hospital, and director of the Center for Biomedical Ethics at National Taiwan University. He president of the Taiwan Association of Institutional Review Boards and a member of an expert advisory committee to the Taiwan government on the Covid-19 pandemic. He served as vice president of the International Association of Bioethics in 2016 to 2017 and is a member of the Merck Ethics Advisory Panel. He was awarded honorary membership by the UNESCO chair in bioethics in 2015 and Goldman-Berland Lectureship in Palliative Medicine in 2019. He has published 20 books and 15 book chapters on bioethics, informed consent, clinical ethics committee, case analysis in medical ethics, research ethics, big data research, and family medicine in Chinese and English. His research interests include cross-cultural bioethics, genetic ethics, transplantation ethics, clinical ethics and ethics consultation, research ethics, research integrity, and medical ethics education. https://scholars.lib.ntu.edu.tw/cris/rp/rp06186
Connie M. Ulrich, PhD, RN, FAAN, MSN, is the Lillian S. Brunner Endowed Chair in Medical and Surgical Nursing and a Professor of Medical Ethics and Health Policy and Nursing at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing with a secondary appointment in the Perelman School of Medicine, department of medical ethics and health policy. Dr. Ulrich’s research focuses on advancing empirical bioethics in both clinical practice and research. Her current work includes a project that aims to better understand the role and responsibilities of clinical ethicists during Covid-19 and the ethical challenges they face in supporting clinicians, patients, and families. She is also the principal investigator of a bioethics educational grant that aims to develop and train nurse and physician bioethicists in Tanzania. Dr. Ulrich has served on several data safety and monitoring boards appointed by the National Institutes of Health and other organizations. In 2015, she provided testimony to the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethics on the value of nursing to the public and to public discourse on ethical issues; the ethical issues that nurses encounter that require bioethics education; and the role of bioethics education in preparing the next generation of nursing professionals. https://www.nursing.upenn.edu/details/profiles.php?id=58
Rebecca L. Walker, PhD, is a professor of social medicine and of philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she is also faculty in the Center for Bioethics, a fellow in the Parr Center for Ethics, and adjunct professor of public policy. Her contributions to bioethics have been in animal research ethics, human healthy volunteer research, genomic advances, respect for autonomy, and health justice. Her work on the ethics of biomedical research using nonhuman animals departs from the typical focus on questions of rights or welfare, which tend to lead to polarizing perspectives. Instead, she promotes a virtue ethical approach, which allows for attention to the ethical issues arising internally to animal research practices. Among her publications, Dr. Walker has co-edited the third edition of the Social Medicine Reader (Duke University Press, 2019), Health Inequalities and Justice: New Conversations Across the Disciplines (UNC Press 2016) and Working Virtue: Virtue Ethics and Contemporary Moral Problems (Oxford University Press, 2007). https://rebeccawalker.web.unc.edu
Laura Wexler, PhD, is the Charles H. Farnam Professor of American studies and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Yale. She writes about intersections of race, gender, sexuality, class, and nation within the photographic cultures of the United States, and yet views bioethics through a broad global lens. Among her many books and other publications, while simultaneously viewing challenges to human flourishing through a broad global lens. Among her many books and other publications, she is the author of the award-winning book, Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism. She is the founding director of the Photographic Memory Workshop at Yale, a founding member of the steering committee of the Feminist Technology Network (FemTechNet), and a member of the Photogrammar Project, which has made a web-based interactive research system for visualizing the more than 170,00 photographs created by the Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information between 1935 and 1945. Her work introduces photography and visual culture as a medium through which powerful transdisciplinary conversations about race, gender, sexuality, class, and nation are generated, and new possibilities for analysis and expression emerge across the disciplines. https://wgss.yale.edu/people/laura-wexler
Douglas White, MD, MAS, is vice chair and a professor of critical care medicine, medicine, and clinical and translational science in the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. He holds the UPMC Endowed Chair for Ethics in Critical Care Medicine. He is the founding director of the University of Pittsburgh Program on Ethics and Decision-Making in Critical Illness, the nation’s first research program focused on ethical issues in ICUs. His research team uses empirical methods and normative analysis to examine ethical challenges that arise in the care of critically ill patients. He has received numerous honors for his scholarly contributions to the field, including induction into the American Society for Clinical Investigation and the Greensick Award for Ethics from the Society of Critical Care Medicine. He chaired the National Institutes of Health’s Societal and Ethical Issues in Research study section and co-chaired a National Academy of Medicine panel on improving collaboration between clinicians, patients, and family members. He has served as an external advisor to the World Health Organization, the California Department of Public Health, and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. https://www.ccm.pitt.edu/?q=content/white-douglas
Bryn Williams-Jones, PhD, is professor of bioethics and director of the Department of Social and Preventive Medicine in the School of Public Health at the University of Montreal. Dr. Williams-Jones is interested in the socio-ethical and policy implications of health innovations in diverse contexts. His work examines the conflicts that arise in academic research and professional practice with a view to developing ethical tools to manage these conflicts when they cannot be avoided. Current projects focus on issues in professional ethics, public health ethics, research integrity, and ethics education. Dr. Williams-Jones heads the Laboratory for Experimental Bioethics (LaBioethX); shares responsibility for the Ethics, Governance, and Democracy branch of the International Observatory on the Societal Impacts of AI and Digital Technology (OBVIA); and is editor-in-chief of the Canadian Journal of Bioethics. Bryn WILLIAMS-JONES – La recherche – Université de Montréal (umontreal.ca)