Joel Michael Reynolds is a Senior Advisor to and Fellow of The Hastings Center, Senior Research Scholar in the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Disability Studies, and Director of the Disability Studies Program at Georgetown University. They are also Faculty in the Department of Family Medicine as well as in the Pellegrino Center for Clinical Bioethics at Georgetown University School of Medicine and Medical Center and a Faculty Scholar of the Greenwall Foundation. Reynolds is the founder of The Journal of Philosophy of Disability and co-founder of the book series Oxford Studies in Disability, Ethics, and Society. In recognition of the impact of their scholarship, they were named an Honorary Fellow of the McLaughlin College of Public Policy at York University in 2022 and elected as a Fellow of The Hastings Center in 2023.

Bridging inquiry across the humanities, social sciences, and medical practice, Reynolds’ research and public engagement center on foundational issues concerning ethics, society, and embodiment with a special focus on identifying, mitigating, and eliminating health inequities faced by disabled people. Their work seeks health justice as rooted in methods that (i) prioritize first-person data (phenomenology, ethnography, and other qualitative approaches) and that (ii) center the lived experience of historically marginalized and oppressed groups. Other central lines of inquiry include: What does flourishing mean in the genomic age? How do our bodies shape experience, understanding, and judgment? How can bioethics better incorporate the insights from disability studies and activism? From 2018-2022, Dr. Reynolds was co-director with Erik Parens of a 2-year, $250k NEH Public Humanities Community Conversations grant project, “The Art of Flourishing: Conversations on Disability, Technology, and Belonging,” and in 2020, he co-edited with Erik Parens a special issue of The Hastings Center Report entitled, “For All of Us? On the Weight of Genomic Knowledge.”

Reynolds is the author or co-author of over sixty publications spanning philosophy, public health, and biomedical ethics as well as six books including The Life Worth Living: Disability, Pain, and Morality (University of Minnesota Press, 2022), The Disability Bioethics Reader (Routledge, 2022), Disability Justice in Public Health Emergencies (Routledge, 2025), and The Meaning of Disability (Oxford University Press, 2025). Their article-length work appears in leading journals across multiple fields, including The New England Journal of Medicine, Nature Biotechnology, JAMA Health Forum, Episteme, Journal of Medical Ethics, Neuroethics, Hastings Center Report, Biological Psychiatry, Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics, Critical Philosophy of Race, Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, and Chiasmi International: Contemporary Phenomenology and Merleau-Ponty Studies. Current research includes a multi-year, externally funded project from The Greenwall Foundation on the relationship between concepts of disability and health measures such as quality of life as well as book chapters for Philosophical Foundations of Disability Law, Methods in Medical Ethics, The Encyclopedia of Phenomenology, and The Oxford Handbook of Genetic Counseling.

Based on his 2018 AMA Journal of Ethics piece, “Three Things Clinicians Should Know About Disability,” Dr. Reynolds regularly speaks with and consults for medical educators across specialties concerning how to improve the quality and equity of care for patients with disabilities, including recent talks at the schools of medicine at Yale, Harvard, and UCLA and for grand rounds across the USA and Canada. Since 2021, Dr. Reynolds has been a Visiting Lecturer in Bioethics at the Yale School of Medicine, and they were the 2023-24 Visiting Professor in Critical Care Ethics & Decision-Making at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.

Dr. Reynolds is regularly interviewed by journalists in outlets including NPR, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and Truthout. Their public scholarship includes pieces in TIME, AEON, The Conversation, Health Progress, The Hastings Bioethics Forum, The Philosopher, and a Tedx talk. Their research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and the Greenwall Foundation. You can reach Dr. Reynolds (he/they) by email at joel.reynolds@georgetown.edu. For more detailed information, please see their website: https://joelreynolds.me.

You can also follow Dr. Reynolds on PhilPapers, ResearchGate, Google Scholar, SSRN, and their personal website.