Scholars
Hastings scholars come from a wide range of disciplines, including philosophy, social psychology, law, political science, education, and theology. Their research takes on some of the most difficult dilemmas and controversies in the areas of human reproduction, genetics, population health, aging, and end-of-life care, and the risks and benefits of new technologies.
Mildred Z. SolomonEd.D.President
Mildred Solomon has an international reputation for her research on, and advocacy for, wiser health care and science policy. In addition to her leadership role at The Hastings Center, she is Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine, part time, at Harvard Medical School, where she directs the school’s Fellowship in Bioethics. Dr. Solomon is both a bioethicist and social science researcher. The primary focus of her bioethics scholarship has been on the ethics of end-of-life care for adults...Nancy BerlingerPh.D.Research Scholar
Nancy Berlinger is a Research Scholar at The Hastings Center, an independent bioethics research institute based in Garrison, NY. Her current research focuses on ethical and societal challenges arising from population aging; the bioethics of migration, and responding to and learning from the Covid-19 pandemic. She has longstanding research interests in decision-making and care in serious illness and near the end of life; the management of problems of safety and harm in health systems, and the mora...Liz Bowen, PhDPhDRice Family Fellow in Bioethics and the Humanities
Liz Bowen is an English literature and disability studies scholar, and the 2020-2022 Rice Family Fellow in Bioethics and the Humanities at The Hastings Center. Her research combines formal analysis with historical context to explore how Americans’ understandings of disability and chronic illness, gender and sexuality, and extrahuman ecologies have shaped both literary form and public discourse. Her dissertation project, “Animal Abilities: Disability, Species Difference, and American Literary...Faith E. FletcherPh.DSenior Advisor
Faith Fletcher is an assistant professor at Baylor College of Medicine. She is currently co-chair of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities RACE Affinity Group, a national special interest group committed to promoting bioethics discourse and cross-disciplinary collaboration around social and structural disadvantage. Her research over the past decade investigates the health care and research experiences of traditionally marginalized and stigmatized populations to inform ethically groun...
Rosemarie Garland-ThomsonPhDSenior Advisor
Rosemarie Garland-Thomson is a disability justice and culture thought leader, bioethicist, educator, and humanities scholar. She consults on many academic and bioethics projects, gives frequent lectures, presentations, and media interviews, publishes in a range of media, and participates in a wide range of web events. Her 2016 op-ed, “Becoming Disabled,” was the inaugural article in the ongoing weekly series in the New York Times about disability by people living with disabilities.Gretchen GreeneC.Phil, MS, JDSenior Advisor
Gretchen Greene is an internationally recognized expert on face and emotion recognition and AI and AV policy and ethics whose advice to governments has been read in 8,000 cities. She is a senior advisor at The Hastings Center.Bruce JenningsM.A.Senior Advisor
Bruce Jennings is a political scientist whose research spans a wide range of subjects, including environmental ethics, health policy, and end-of-life care. He is an adjunct associate professor at Vanderbilt University’s Center for Biomedical Ethics and a senior fellow at the Center for Humans and Nature, a nonprofit research center that studies environmental ethics and policy. He was executive director of The Hastings Center from 1991 to 1999 and is a Hastings senior advisor and a Hastings ...Rosemary GibsonM.S.Senior Advisor
Rosemary Gibson writes and lectures about health care, health care reform, Medicare, and patient safety. She is a senior advisor at The Hastings Center. She led national health care quality and and safety initiatives at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. She was chief architect of the foundation’s decade-long strategy that successfully established palliative care in more than 1,600 hospitals in the United States. She is the recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Academ...Michael K. GusmanoPh.D.Research Scholar
Michael Gusmano investigates health care equity in the U.S. and other countries. His research and publications have focused on health policy, aging, and comparative welfare state analysis. He is the codirector of the World Cities Project, the first effort to compare the performance of health, social, and long-term care systems in New York, London, Paris and Tokyo, the four largest cities among the wealthy nations of the world. In addition to being a research scholar at The Hastings Center, he is ...Josephine JohnstonLL.B., MBHL.Director of Research, Research Scholar
Josephine Johnston is an expert on the ethical, legal, and policy implications of biomedical technologies, particularly as used in human reproduction, psychiatry, genetics, and neuroscience. In addition to numerous scholarly publications, her commentaries have appeared in Stat News, The New Republic, Time, Washington Post, and The Scientist. Ms. Johnston is interviewed frequently by the media, appearing in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, the Guardian, Wired, and Vice Media and on ...Gregory E. KaebnickPh.D.Director, Editorial Department; Editor, Hastings Center Report; Research Scholar
Gregory E. Kaebnick explores questions about the values at stake in developing and using biotechnologies and, particularly, in questions about the value given to nature and human nature. He is also the director of the Editorial Department and the editor of the Hastings Center Report. He has testified before Congress on ethical issues concerning the use of new genetic technologies and served on a National Research Council and National Academy of Sciences committee, Gene Drive Research in Non-Hu...Karen J. MaschkePh.D.Research Scholar; Editor, Ethics & Human Research
Karen Maschke has expertise on the ethical, regulatory and policy issues involving the development, assessment, and use of new biomedical technologies. She has worked on several NIH-funded studies and expert advisory groups that addressed privacy, transparency, and government surveillance issues related to the collection, storage, and use of biometric data and research and health data, including identifiable and deidentified genomic and epigenomic data. She was a collaborator and the Hastings Cen...Sarah McGrawPh.D.Research Methodologist
Sarah McGraw is a medical anthropologist who applies qualitative research methods to questions pertaining to public health and research ethics. Her work concerns informed consent in biobanking; end-of-life care; and health care for people with addictions, mental illness, and other chronic conditions. Among her current projects is a qualitative research study as part of the Football Players Health Study at Harvard University in which she is interviewing players and their families related to their ...Thomas MurrayPh.D.President Emeritus
Thomas H. Murray was president of The Hastings Center from 1999 to 2012. He was formerly the director of the Center for Biomedical Ethics in the School of Medicine at Case Western Reserve University, where he was also the Susan E. Watson Professor of Bioethics. He serves on many editorial boards and has testified before many Congressional committees. Among other current posts, he serves as an international expert advisor to Singapore’s Bioethics Advisory Committee and vice chair of Charity Nav...Carolyn P. NeuhausPh.DResearch Scholar
Carolyn P. Neuhaus explores philosophical and ethical questions that arise throughout biomedical research and medical practice, from the philosophical foundations of the use of animals in biomedical research to the development of digital medicine and use of AI in healthcare. She is currently engaged in research in The Hastings Center’s Humans and Nature and Science and the Self project areas.Erik ParensPh.D.Senior Research Scholar
At The Hastings Center, Erik Parens explores how sciences, such as genetics and neuroscience, shape our understanding of ourselves. He also explores the ethical questions that arise as we use technologies, such as gene editing, surgery, and psychopharmacology, to shape ourselves. Those two lines of inquiry begin to come together in his 2015 book Shaping Our Selves: On Technology, Flourishing, and a Habit of Thinking.Joel Michael ReynoldsPhDSenior Advisor
Joel Michael Reynolds is a senior advisor to The Hastings Center and an assistant professor of philosophy and disability studies at Georgetown University. He is also the founder of the Journal of Philosophy of Disability, which he edits with Teresa Blankmeyer Burke. His research and public engagement center on foundational issues concerning ethics, society, and embodiment. What does flourishing mean in the genomic age? How do our bodies shape experience, understanding, and judgment?...Wendell WallachM.Ed.Senior Advisor
Wendell Wallach is an internationally recognized expert on the ethical and governance concerns posed by emerging technologies, particularly artificial intelligence and neuroscience. He is a consultant, an ethicist, and a scholar at Yale University’s Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics, where he chairs the working research group on technology and ethics. He is a Hastings Center senior advisor. He is co-author (with Colin Allen) of Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right from Wrong, which maps t...
