Hastings Center News

Meet Our New Research Scholar: Virginia A. Brown

We’re pleased to welcome the newest member of our research team, Virginia A. Brown, PhD. She focuses on social justice, population health, and public engagement. She joined The Hastings Center from the University of Texas at Austin Dell Medical School.

Virginia has expertise on protecting the autonomy of persons living with serious mental illness using psychiatric advance directives. She uses the tools of social science to recognize and respond to ethical issues in health and health care as public issues rather than personal troubles. To that end, as a public sociologist, her scholarship seeks to “engage multiple publics in multiple ways.” She works to respond to health and health care inequity at the individual, community, and institutional level and as she writes, this gives her “the moral courage to speak truth to power.”

Learn more about Virginia A. Brown.

Read a new commentary she coauthored on palliative mental health care, “What Makes Palliative Mental Health Care Ethical Health Care?”