Course Faculty (June 1-5, 2009)

Tom Beauchamp, Ph.D., Professor of Philosoply and a Senior Scholar at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics. In 1976, he wrote the bulk of the Belmont Report. He is a noted scholar of the 18th c. Scottish philosopher, David Hume. With James F. Childress, PhD, Tom authored the seminal work (and the IBC course book), Principles of Biomedical Ethics. His research interests are in the history of modern philosophy and practical ethics, in particular biomedical and business ethics.
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Laura J. Bishop, Ph.D., Research Associate at the National Reference for Bioethics Literature, Kennedy Institute of Ethics, has research interests that include the role of the family in medical decisionmaking, bioethics education in secondary schools, resources for teaching ethics, and curriculum development.
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Alisa Carse, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University, and Faculty Affiliate of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics. Her teaching and research are centered in moral theory, social and political theory, moral psychology, and gender theory. She has written widely on vulnerability and human flourishing, care and justice.
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James F. Childress, Ph.D., is the Hollingsworth Professor of Ethics at the University of Virginia, where he directs the Institute for Practical Ethics. He is the author of numerous articles and several books, including Principles of Biomedical Ethics with Tom Beauchamp, Practical Reasoning in Bioethics, Who Should Decide? Paternalism in Health Care and Priorities in Biomedical Ethics. He was a member of the presidentiallyappointed National Bioethics Advisory Commission.
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Vanessa Northington Gamble, M.D., Ph.D., is a physician and noted scholar in the field of medical humanities. She developed one of the first courses in the country to explore the history of race and American medicine and public health. In 1997, Dr. Gamble chaired the Tuskegee Syphilis Study Legacy Committee, and in 1999, Dr. Gamble was appointed head of the Association of American Medical Colleges’ (AAMC) Division of Community and Minority Programs. She served as deputy director of the Center for Health Disparities Solut ions at Johns Hopk ins University’s Bloomberg School of Medicine, and in September 2007, Dr. Gamble was named University Professor of Medical Humanities at George Washington University in Washington, DC. She is the first woman to hold the prestigious endowed faculty position.
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Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Ph.D.is Professor of Women's Studies at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Her fields of study are feminist theory, American literature, and disability studies. Her scholarly and professional activities are devoted to developing the field of disability studies in the humanities and in women's studies. She is the author of Staring: How We Look (Oxford UP, forthcoming 2008), Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Literature and Culture (Columbia UP, 1997); editor of Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body (NYU Press, 1996), and co-editor of Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities (MLA Press, 2002). She is currently writing a book called Cure or Kill: The Cultural Logic of Euthanasia, which traces eugenic thought through American literature.
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John Gluck, Ph.D., is a Professor Emeritus of Psychology, University of New Mexico, and a Faculty Affiliate of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics. As Senior Bioethicist at the Health Sciences Institute for Ethics, he taught nursing and medical students for many years concerning topics of professional ethics, research, and clinical ethics. Dr. Gluck has published widely on the topics of the effects of early rearing on behavioral development, research and clinical ethics.
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Loretta Kopelman, Ph.D., is a Professor at the Brody School of Medicine at East Carolina University, where she founded and chaired its Department of Medical Humanities. She is a Faculty Affiliate of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics. She was founding president of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities and a member of the Institute of Medicine’s Committee on Research with Children. She has published widely, including topics in bioethics, medical ethics, the rights of retarded individuals, research ethics, philosophy and medicine, the fair allocation of health care resources, and especially on children’s rights and welfare.
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Rebecca Kukla, Ph.D., is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Florida, and also Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology and a core faculty member in the graduate program in Medical Humanities and Bioethics at USF. She received a Greenwall Postdoctoral Fellowship in Bioethics and Health Policy at Johns Hopkins University in 2005. She is the current co-coordinator of the Feminist Approaches to Bioethics Network, a scholarly society with members in thirty countries. Her research interests include philosophical and cultural studies of medicine, epistemology, eighteenth century philosophy, and feminist philosophy.
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Maggie O. Little, Ph.D., the IBC Course Director and Associate Professor of Philosophy, has graduate degrees from the University of Oxford and UC-Berkeley. She has published on a broad range of topics in ethics, from moral epistemology and moral realism to applied issues in bioethics. She has written on surrogate motherhood, abortion, method in moral theory, and the objectivity of ethics. Her publications include Abortion, Intimacy and the “Duty” to Gestate, and she is co-editor of a book with Brad Hooker, Moral Particularism.
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Debra J.H. Mathews, Ph.D., M.A., is the Assistant Director for Science Programs for the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics, with a secondary appointment in the Institute of Genetic Medicine, and as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Pediatrics at the School of Medicine. She completed the Greenwall Fellowship in Bioethics and Health Policy, which is jointly administered by JHU and Georgetown Universities. As a Greenwall Fellow, she worked at the Genetics and Public Policy Center, in Washington, DC, and the US Department of Health and Human Services. At JHU’s Berman Institute, Dr. Mathews oversees the Stem Cell Policy and Ethics program and the Program in Ethics and Brain Sciences, as well as other initiatives in policy and ethics related to biomedical research and emerging technologies, including genetics, synthetic biology and nanotechnology. Dr. Mathews's research interests focus on the intersection of science, ethics and public policy.
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Edmund Pellegrino, M.D., is Professor Emeritus of Medicine and Medical Ethics at the Georgetown University Medical Center. In fall 2005, Dr. Pellegrino was appointed as the Chair of the President’s Council on Bioethics. Dr. Pellegrino has authored over 550 published items in medical science, philosophy, and ethics and is a member of numerous editorial boards. He is the author or co-author of 19 books, and the founding editor of the Journal of Medicine and Philosophy.
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Madison Powers, J.D., D.Phil., is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University. Research interests include political, legal, and moral philosophy with a special interest in the intersection of law, ethics, and health policy. Dr. Powers has published numerous journal articles and book chapters on a variety of topics in normative and practical philosophy. He has participated in many private and governmental advisory bodies including the Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee (RAC) for the NIH. He is co-author with Ruth Faden of Social Justice: The Moral Foundations of Public Health and Health Care Policy.
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Karen Stohr, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University. Karen’s main research area is ethics, with a focus on Aristotelian virtue ethics and Kantian ethics. She is also interested in bioethics, particularly in the Catholic tradition. Her research concerns the virtue of practical wisdom, moral responsibility and moral luck, the Kantian duty of beneficence, and moral obligations to improve the moral perfection of others.
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Carol Taylor, R.N., Ph.D., is Director of the Center for Clinical Bioethics at the GU Medical Center. Experienced in caring for patients who are chronically and critically ill and their families, Carol now works closely with health care professionals who are exploring the ethical dimensions of their practice. She serves as an ethics consultant to systems and professional organizations. Her research interests include professional and organizational ethics, and healthcare decisionmaking.
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Robert M. Veatch, Ph.D., is Professor of Medical Ethics at Georgetown University. He writes extensively on medical ethics, including pharmacy and nursing ethics. He is the Senior Editor of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal and the Newsletter on Ethics and Intellectual Disability. He frequently serves as an expert witness in cases of medical ethics. He has worked extensively in areas of death and dying, human experimentation, and organ transplantation. Among many other books, he is the author of Transplantation Ethics and The Basics of Bioethics.
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LeRoy Walters, Ph.D., is the Joseph P. Kennedy Professor of Christian Ethics at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics. He is a former director of the Institute, and has special interests in ethical issues in eugenics, human genetics, and international stem cell research policies. He teaches courses on “Ethics and Human Genetics”, “Eugenics and Ethics,” and “Ethics and the Holocaust.” His most recent books include co-authoring with Tom Beauchamp, Contemporary Issues in Bioethics, and The Ethics of Human Gene Therapy with Julie Gage Palmer.
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David Wendler, Ph.D., is head of the Unit on Vulnerable Populations in the Department of Clinical Bioethics at the NIH. He is a philosopher trained in the philosophy of science, and has been a consultant to numerous organizations, including the Council of International Organizations of Medical Sciences, the American College of Cardiology, the National Institute on Aging, and the National Institute on Drug Abuse. He is currently a member of the IRB of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. His current research focuses on clinical research with individuals who are unable to provide informed consent.
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Last updated on September 22, 2009 - Feedback