Hastings Center News
The Hastings Center Announces Three Promotions
The Hastings Center is pleased to announce three staff promotions in the Advancement, Research, and Editorial Departments. The promotions are part of a reorganization meant to optimize the alignment of the Center’s structure with its mission and goals.
“The reorganization positions The Hastings Center to establish priorities for its research, public engagement, and impact,” says Hastings Center President Vardit Ravitsky.
Ryan Sauder has been named Chief Strategy and Advancement Officer. This is a new position in which he oversees fundraising and communications and works with the president, colleagues, trustees, and others to define and advance the organization’s strategic priorities.
Previously, Sauder was the Chief Advancement Officer, a position he held since he joined The Hastings Center in 2020. Among his accomplishments, Sauder oversaw The Hastings Center’s 50th Anniversary Campaign, established to expand the organization’s research capacity, communications and engagement efforts, and development infrastructure. The five-year comprehensive campaign, which concluded in December 2023, generated $14.1 million in surge funding, exceeding the $12.5 million goal by nearly 13%.
In addition to his individual and organizational fundraising accomplishments, Sauder formalized and refined the Center’s gift planning and legacy gift program and staffed the committee that led the international search to identify a new president last year.
Before joining The Hastings Center, Sauder spent 12 years at Franklin & Marshall College, ultimately serving as Assistant Dean of Academic Advancement and Senior Director of the Office of College Grants, which he helped conceptualize and launch in 2012.
Gregory E. Kaebnick has become the Research Director. In this position, Kaebnick takes the lead in guiding the Research Department and shaping its strategic priorities, as well as aligning scholarship with the Center’s mission.
In addition, Kaebnick remains a Senior Research Scholar and is Co-Editor of the Hastings Center Report. As a research scholar, Kaebnick explores questions about the values at stake in developing and using biotechnologies and, particularly, about the value given to nature and human nature. He is currently the principal investigator of a project funded by the National Science Foundation on the ethics of causing the extinction of a species by means of genome editing. He has also led projects funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
He has testified before Congress on ethical issues concerning synthetic biology and served on a National Academy of Sciences committee, Gene Drive Research in Non-Human Organisms: Recommendations for Responsible Conduct. He is the author of Humans in Nature: The World As We Find It and the World As We Create It (Oxford, 2014). He was an associate editor for the fourth edition of the Encyclopedia of Bioethics (MacMillan, 2014) and editor of several editions of Taking Sides: Clashing Views on Bioethical Issues (McGraw-Hill, 2013-2019).
Laura Haupt has been promoted to Co-Editor of the Hastings Center Report. Previously, she was the Managing Editor of the Report and Ethics & Human Research, a position she held since coming to The Hastings Center in 2013. With her new role, Haupt is also the consulting editor for Ethics & Human Research.
As the Managing Editor of The Hastings Center’s journals, Haupt distinguished herself by helping to shepherd the relaunch and expansion of Ethics & Human Research in 2019 and by her work on numerous special reports. In the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic, Haupt was instrumental in meeting the moment with a special Covid theme issue of the Hastings Center Report in May-June 2020—by far the largest Hastings Center Report issue ever published—that explored the question, does bioethics as a field need to be expanded, redirected, even reconceived? Among the special reports Haupt has helped produce are A Critical Moment in Bioethics: Reckoning with Anti-Black Racism through Intergenerational Dialogue (March-April 2022) and Facing Dementia: Clarifying End-of-Life Choices, Supporting Better Lives (January-February 2024).