Hastings Center fellows certificate

Hastings Center News

New Hastings Center Fellows Elected

The Hastings Center is pleased to announce the election of 12 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. Their common distinguishing feature is uncommon insight and impact in areas of critical concern to the Center–how best to understand and manage the inevitable values questions, moral uncertainties, and societal effects that arise as a consequence of advances in the life sciences, the need to improve health and health care for people of all ages, and mitigation of human impact on the natural world.

Eli Y. Adashi, MD, is a professor of medical science at Brown University and the former dean of medicine and biological sciences. He has received numerous honors, including being elected to the National Academy of Medicine. He is a member of The Hastings Center’s advisory council. He is former president of the Society for Reproductive Endocrinologists, Society for Gynecologic Investigation, and the American Gynecological and Obstetrical Society. He has also served as director of the Division of Reproductive Endocrinology of the American Board of Obstetrics and Gynecology. He is the author or co-author of more than 500 professional articles and chapters and is the editor or co-editor of 16 books. His current writing interests focus on the nexus of medicine, law, and ethics. His  work has been featured in the New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Huffington Post and other media outlets.

Robert M. Arnold, MD, is a Distinguished Service Professor of Medicine in the division of general internal medicine and chief of the section of palliative care and medical ethics at the University of Pittsburgh. He also is a member of the Center for Bioethics and Health Law where he coordinates the clinical ethics education programs. He has published extensively on ethical issues in end-of-life care, hospice and palliative care, doctor-patient communication, and ethics education. His current research interests are on educational interventions to improve communication in life-limiting illnesses and understanding how ethical precepts are implemented in clinical practice. He has been heavily involved in VitalTalk, a nonprofit company that promotes better relationships between clinicians and seriously ill patients and their families. He is a past president of the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine and of the Society for Health and Human Values (now the American Society of Bioethics).

Joanne M. Braxton, Ph.D, M.Div, is Frances L. and Edwin L. Cummings Professor of the Humanities Emeritus at William & Mary and a former David B. Larson Fellow in Spirituality and Health at the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress. Her project at the Kluge Center was “Tree of Life: Spirituality and Well-Being in the African American Experience.” Her research and writing interests bridge humanities, well-being, and the arts. She is the author or editor of several scholarly books, as well as essays and blogs. She has been a W.E.B. DuBois Fellow at Harvard University; a Mellon Fellow at the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women; and a senior Fulbright Professor in Germany, France and Spain. Braxton also leads the Braxton Institute, a nonprofit organization founded in 2012 that fosters physical, emotional, and spiritual sanctuary for caregivers and those building a more just, joyful and sustainable world.

Reshma Jagsi, MD, D.Phil, is Newman Family Professor and deputy chair in the department of radiation oncology at the University of Michigan and director of the Center for Bioethics and Social Sciences in Medicine. Gender equity in academic medicine is a key area of her scholarly focus and leadership, and she brings to her research in this area her perspective as a physician and social scientist to promote evidence-based intervention. She is the author of more than 250 articles in peer-reviewed journals, including multiple high-impact studies in the New England Journal of Medicine and JAMA. Her research also includes using deliberative democratic approaches to illuminate patients’ attitudes towards secondary use of data collected in routine clinical encounters and investigation of patient attitudes towards approaches used by hospitals to encourage donations from grateful patients. Her work is frequently featured in major media outlets, including  the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, NPR, and national network nightly news. 

Kathy Kinlaw, M.Div, HEC-C, is associate director of the Emory University Center for Ethics and director of the Center’s Program in Health, Science, and Ethics. She is also an assistant professor of pediatrics at Emory School of Medicine and director of the Healthcare Ethics Consortium, a network of health care systems. She directs integration of clinical ethics at the medical school and is a core, founding faculty member in the MA in Bioethics program. She has provided ethical analysis in public policy arenas, including public health ethics collaboration with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and bioethics guidance to legislators and drafters of the Georgia Advance Directive for Healthcare (2007), the 2010 revision of the Georgia Informed Consent law, and the Georgia POLST (physician orders for life-sustaining treatment). Her publications and scholarly interests are primarily in the areas of ethics committees and ethics consultation in health care institutions, palliative and end-of-life care, faith and ethics, ethics and medical education, pediatric ethics, and public health ethics.

Mark G. Kuczewski, PhD, is the director of the Neiswanger Institute for Bioethics and Health Policy at Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine. He holds the Father Michael I. English, S.J., Professorship in Medical Ethics and was the founding chair of the department of medical education. He is a past-president of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities. He is the author or editor of three books including (with Rosa Lynn Pinkus and Katherine Wasson) An Ethics Casebook for Hospitals: Practical Approaches to Everyday Cases (Georgetown University Press, 1999; 2018 2nd edition). He is a leading national and international voice for the equitable treatment of undocumented immigrants in the clinical setting. His efforts led to Stritch becoming the first medical school in the nation to welcome applications from Dreamers, young undocumented immigrants who are protected under  the Deferred Action for Children Arrivals Act (DACA). He has worked with undocumented medical students to create resources to assist clinicians in this effort. These materials are available through the Sanctuary Doctoring website and are being used at many health systems and clinics around the nation.

Ruipeng Lei, PhD, is executive director of Center for Bioethics and a professor of bioethics at Huazhong University of Science and Technology in Wuhan, China. She was a research fellow at Harvard School of Public Health, vice president of the Asian Bioethics Association, and a member of the Sino-UK-USA Summer School of Philosophy. Her research focuses on ethical, policy, and governance issues raised in emerging technologies, such as xenotransplantation, biobanks, synthetic biology, human genome editing, stem cell clinical translations, and robotics. She makes policy recommendations to China’s government based on her ethical research. She is the author of 51 major publications, including two books: Xenograft: Philosophical Reflection and Ethical Issues (2015) and a forthcoming book on gene editing. She is leading a large project, “Research in the Framework of Ethics, Policy and Law for Synthetic Biology,” approved by the Ministry of Science and Technology.

Amy Lynn McGuire, JD, PhD, is the Leon Jaworski Professor of Biomedical Ethics and director of the Center for Medical Ethics and Health Policy at Baylor College of Medicine. Her research focuses on the clinical integration of emerging technologies, with a focus on ethical and policy issues in human genetics and genomic research. She serves on the program committee for the Greenwall Foundation Faculty Scholars Program in Bioethics. She was a member of the National Advisory Council for Human Genome Research from 2011 to 2015 and is immediate past president of the Association of Bioethics Program Directors. She has received numerous grants from the National Institutes of Health and has written almost 150 peer-reviewed articles in the biomedical and science literatures (including many in the highest-impact journals), which have been cited almost 20,000 times.

Eric M. Meslin, Ph.D., FCAHS, is the president and CEO of the Council of Canadian Academies, a nonprofit organization that conducts independent, authoritative, evidence-based expert assessments of leading policy topics for the Canadian government. Prior to joining CCA, Meslin spent 15 years at Indiana University where he was founding director of the Indiana University Center for Bioethics and associate dean for bioethics in the school of medicine. He was the bioethics research director of the Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications (ELSI) program at the National Human Genome Research Institute and executive director of the National Bioethics Advisory Commission established by President Bill Clinton. He is a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences, and a Chevalier de l’Ordre Nationale du Mérite (Knight of the National Order of Merit) for contributions to French bioethics policy. He has published more than 200 articles and book chapters, and two co-edited books on ethical and policy issues in genomics, international health, science policy, and human subjects research.

Christine Mitchell, RN, MS, MTS, FAAN, is executive director of the Center for Bioethics and a lecturer in the department of global health and social medicine at Harvard Medical School. She founded the ethics program at Boston Children’s Hospital, directing the ethics consultation service and leading the ethics advisory committee for 30 years. She has served on numerous national committees and commissions, including the Ethics Advisory Board for the European Human Brain Project, the Clinical Ethics Consultation Committee for the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities, and the Ethics Committee for the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. She is president-elect of the Association of Bioethics Program Directors.  Her published work includes documentary films, one of which was nominated for an Academy Award. She has written over 80 articles on numerous topics in bioethics for the American Journal of Nursing, The New England Journal of Medicine, Hastings Center Report, Journal of Clinical Ethics, and other journals, as well as Newsweek.  Her research has focused on ethics consultation and public engagement in ethical aspects of institutional policies.

Lisa S. Parker, PhD, is Dickie, McCamey & Chilcote Professor of Bioethics at the University of Pittsburgh, where she directs the Center for Bioethics and Health Law; Master of Arts in Bioethics; and the School of Medicine’s concentration in humanities, ethics, and palliative care. She has over 60 articles and 30 book chapters on ethical concerns in the design and conduct of research, particularly genetic and mental health research, as well as aesthetic surgery, confidentiality, and informed consent. Her recent research focuses on ethical management of incidental findings and return of research results, pharmacogenomic research, and precision medicine. She has taught in Fogarty International Center research ethics training programs in China, Egypt, and India. Within the National Institutes of Health, she chaired the Genomics and Society Working Group of NHGRI, and served on the Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications and Societal and Ethical Issues in Research study sections, and the Expert Scientific Panel of the Electronic Medical Records and Genomics (eMERGE) Network. Current national and international research collaborations include ethical issues in research on depression, traumatic brain injury, mild cognitive impairment, and biobanking and whole exome/genome sequencing studies in different patient populations.

Jenny Reardon, PhD,  is a professor of sociology and the founding director of the Science and Justice Research Center at University of California, Santa Cruz. Her first book, Race to the Finish: Identity and Governance in an Age of Genomics (Princeton University Press in 2005) is widely used across the natural and social sciences to introduce students to the entanglement of political and ethical issues in efforts to understand human genetic differences. Her second book, The Postgenomic Condition: Ethics, Justice, Knowledge After the Genome (Chicago Press, 2017), examines the decade after the Human Genome Project and the fundamental questions about meaning, value, and justice this landmark achievement left in its wake. She has been the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, including from the National Science Foundation, Max Planck Institute, Humboldt Foundation, Brocher Foundation, and the United States Congressional Committee on Science, Space and Technology. She is regularly asked to speak and advise on the relations between science, medicine and society.