Hastings Center News
Maschke Elected Hastings Center Fellow
Karen J. Maschke, a senior research scholar at The Hastings Center and editor of Ethics & Human Research, 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.
Maschke has expertise on the ethical, regulatory and policy issues involving the development, assessment, and use of new biomedical technologies. Since joining The Hastings Center in 2003, she has worked on several National Institutes of Health-funded studies and expert advisory groups that addressed consent, privacy, transparency, and governance issues related to the collection, storage, and use of biometric data and research and health data, including identifiable and deidentified genomic data.
She is the lead co-principal investigator of a four-year project, Informing Ethical Translation of Xenotransplantation Clinical Trials, funded by the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences of the National Institutes of Health. Through engagement with diverse stakeholders (kidney transplant candidates, clinicians, translational scientists, IRB members, and research ethics experts) the project will develop guidance for the ethical conduct of xenotransplant clinical trials with pig kidneys, decision aids for patients and IRB members, and case studies for clinicians. She was the co-principal investigator of another NIH-funded project, Actionable Ethics Oversight for Human-Animal Chimera Research, and a co-investigator of Public Deliberation on Gene Editing in the Wild, which was funded by the National Science Foundation.
Maschke is the co-author, with Michael K. Gusmano, of Debating Modern Medical Technologies: The Politics of Safety, Effectiveness, and Patient Access (Praeger, 2018), which explores disputes about what evidence should be used to evaluate the safety and effectiveness of several technologies, including stem cell interventions, amyloid PET scans, and mammography. She is an editor of She is an editor of Performance-Enhancing Technologies in Sports: Ethical, Conceptual, and Scientific Issues (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009).
Maschke received her PhD in political science from Johns Hopkins University and a master’s degree in bioethics from Case Western Reserve University. Learn more about Karen J. Maschke