Where Are They Now?
Christine Grady, R.N., Ph.D.
Acting Director and Deputy Director, Department of Bioethics, Clinical Center, National Institutes of Health; Member of the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues
I began my philosophy studies at Georgetown in the late 1980s and finished in 1993. During those same years, I was also working as a clinical specialist and a nurse researcher at the NIH, and gave birth to 3 children. My previous educational experiences had been very science based, so adjusting to think philosophically was challenging at first. My favorite classes were those that related philosophical theories, principles, and concepts to topics of interest to me as a clinician, for example rights and responsibilities, access, death and dying and others. I found the Proseminars very useful in appreciating a broad view of the philosophical areas addressed (especially Metaphysics and Epistemology). My dissertation was about the ethics of testing HIV vaccines, written under the thoughtful mentorship of Leroy Walters. After my defense, I was surprised and excited to be invited by Indiana University Press to turn the dissertation into a book.
I have been at the NIH for many years in various capacities. After completing my PhD at Georgetown, I moved into a newly created Clinical Center Department of Bioethics. At that time, there were 2 other people, but the Department has grown and thrived and currently we have more than 25 smart, productive, engaged, and interesting philosophers, lawyers, clinicians, and others in our Department. We are engaged in conceptual and empirical research; education of fellows, investigators, clinicians, students, members of the public, and others; and providing bioethics consultation to patients, families, staff, researchers, and others at the NIH. The time I spent at KIE provided me with skills and ways of thinking that have been integral to the work I am privileged to do. View Christine Grady's Profile
John Lawrence Hill, J.D., Ph.D.
Professor of Law and Professor of Philosophy (Adjunct), Indiana University, Indianapolis
I completed the joint J.D./Ph.D. in philosophy at Georgetown in the late '80s. I received my J.D. in 1988 and the Ph.D. in 1989. My experience at Georgetown was wonderful. I wrote my dissertation, an ethical and legal analysis of surrogate mother contracts (which was hot at the time), under the direction of Dr. LeRoy Walters. Dr. Walters was (and, no doubt, remains) a kind and supportive teacher and dissertation director. I also took classes with Dr. Edmund Pellegrino, who was an inspiring teacher. I am indebted to Georgetown University and to the Kennedy Institute for an excellent, multi-disciplinary education in ethics, law and medical issues.
I am now teaching law at Indiana University-Indianapolis where I teach constitutional law, jurisprudence, bioethics courses and a course on civil procedure. I also occasionally teach classes in the Philosophy Department here, including classes on moral, social and political theory. I've recently published a book, The Political Centrists (Vanderbilt University Press, 2009). View John Hill's Profile
Elisa A. Hurley, Ph.D.
Education Director, Public Responsibility in Medicine and Research (PRIM&R)
I arrived in the Ph.D. program at Georgetown in 1999, after a three-year break from academia, planning to pursue my burgeoning interests in bioethics and philosophy of medicine. That first year I took Margaret Little's Feminist Bioethics, a class that has had a lasting influence on me, not only because it brought me to academic feminism for the first time, but also because it provided me my first opportunity to write about bioethical issues from a specifically feminist perspective, something I am still doing today. While taking courses like Moral Particularism, with Margaret Little, and The Emotions, with Nancy Sherman, I discovered that I was deeply interested in questions in moral psychology and metaethics as well. What was wonderful for me about studying at Georgetown was that I didn't need to choose between being involved in bioethics and the KIE and my other philosophical interests. So, under the superb and supportive mentorship of Nancy Sherman, Maggie Little, and Mark Lance, I ended up writing a dissertation that sought to provide a novel account of emotions by investigating the practical contributions our emotions make to our understanding of and commitment to values; but I was also able, with my colleague Amy Sepinwall, to start and run a KIE-sponsored bioethics works-in-progress brown bag series, which brought in bioethicists from the general Washington, DC area to talk about their work. I also found that I benefited tremendously from the KIE's close and excellent relationships with other bioethics institutions in the area; for example, it was through folks at the KIE that I was able to get involved as a summer intern and research assistant with the Department of Clinical Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health.
I have no doubt that it was in part because of this background that I received a one-year Greenwall Post-Doctoral Fellowship in Bioethics and Health Policy after graduating from Georgetown in 2006. The following year I took up a tenure-track position in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Western Ontario, where my teaching and research focuses on ethical theory, moral psychology, and issues in bioethics, specifically, feminist bioethics. I also served on the University's Non-Medical Research Ethics Board (the Canadian equivalent of an IRB). Subsequently I took up a position as the Education Director of Public Responsibility in Medicine and Research. I couldn't even begin to enumerate all the ways my graduate training helped prepare me for my current work. Whether I'm consulting my old notes from my Ethics Proseminar in preparation for teaching a particularly difficult topic to my metaethics class, or calling up a piece of wisdom from my own former mentors when talking to a graduate student about the process of philosophical writing, or thinking about how to frame the particular philosophical problem I'm wrestling with in an article I'm writing, my graduate experience is with me every day. Read More About PRIM&R
Jon Jay, J.D., M.A.
Bioethicist, Henry F. Jackson Foundation-Division of AIDS, NIAID/NIH/DHHS
My experience at Georgetown in the joint JD/MA program has been especially useful because I picked up a wide variety of bioethical skills in just a few years. I was able to study health law and policy at Law Center; normative ethics in the Department of Philosophy; bioethical theory in the Kennedy Institute; and participate in clinical bioethics activities, including IRB review, at the Medical Center. A day might have included shuttling from an IRB meeting at the Medical Center to a Law Center seminar discussing privacy of genetic test results in clinical research, then home to read metaethics. And not only were there a wide variety of options, but in each setting I connected with the highest caliber of faculty and engaged, supportive classmates. In my current position, I work as a contractor bioethicist with staff at the Division of AIDS, the office at the National Institutes of Health which coordinates HIV/AIDS research. Our group provides input to policymakers and investigators on specific research protocols and best practices generally--truly exciting work for someone with an interest in human subjects research ethics. It's impossible to become an expert in all the areas relevant to bioethics--and it'll take me much longer to become an expert in any--but it's certainly an advantage to feel well-prepared in a few. I feel lucky, in my current position and going forward in a multidisciplinary field, to have a background that provides me flexibility in approaching problems and communicating with colleagues. Hoya Saxa!. Contact: jonathan "dot" jay "at" nih "dot" hhs "dot" gov
Eric T. Juengst, Ph.D.
Director, UNC Center for Bioetchics; Professor, Department of Social Medicine and Department of Genetics, School of Medicine, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
I started my graduate studies at Georgetown in 1978, straight from an undergraduate major in Biology. I was impressed in my first seminar that, instead of a textbook or articles from the literature, Dr. Beauchamp had us reading and responding to draft chapters of some book that he was in the process of writing with a colleague. Maybe that's how they did graduate school in Philosophy? It turned out, of course, to be the first edition of The Principles of Biomedical Ethics. These days, when I teach from the fifth edition, I still point with pride to the line in Chapter Three where I suggested that period instead of a comma, and Tom concurred.
That experience, of being in on something big from its beginning, typified my time at Georgetown. I worked as a research assistant for H. T. Engelhardt, Jr., tracking down references for the early volumes of the "Philosophy and Medicine" book series and proofreading the first edition of Concepts of Health and Disease: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. From a part-time job at the National Endowment for the Humanities, I got myself assigned as their "inter-agency liaison" to the Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee ("Sure, why not? Knock yourself out," said my boss) where I watched LeRoy Walters lead the Human Gene Therapy Subcommittee in developing some " Points to Consider" in anticipation of the first clinical trials of human gene transfer. I interviewed for a job with the new President's Commission to work on a report about "defining death", and lost it – but only to a fellow Georgetown student and friend, Dorle Vawter, whose pub stories then introduced us to the intricacies of doing bioethics in public.
Since defending my dissertation in 1985 my career has moved up the academic ladder through positions and promotions in a zig-zag pattern, always on the strength of letters from my Georgetown mentors. One particularly important opportunity for me was my time as the first director of the Human Genome Project's Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications Program, from 1990-1994. Unsurprisingly, when NIH needs advice about the world of bioethics, they go to the Kennedy Institute. When they asked about possible program directors for their new ethics experiment, LeRoy Walters recommended that they talk to me. That opened a door for me that no other graduate program in the world could have unlocked so easily. True to form, it once again involved me in the beginning of something big, which has continued to fuel my work ever since. View Eric Juengst's Homepage
Jeffrey Kahn, Ph.D., M.P.H.
Deputy Director for Policy and Administration, Johns Hopkins University Berman Institute of Bioethics
I graduated from Georgetown in 1989, so it's been a while since I was a graduate student. But my experience at Georgetown was instrumental to my training and subsequent career path. I was extremely lucky to have had Prof. Tom Beauchamp as my dissertation advisor, as well as being able to work with him as a graduate assistant as part of my graduate fellowship. I had an excellent experience writing my dissertation, owing largely to the mentoring of Prof. Beauchamp. His mentoring continued as I went onto the job market and was offered a faculty position immediately after graduating (at the East Carolina University School of Medicine).
I'm fortunate to have continued that relationship over the 20+ years since leaving Georgetown and consider Tom a close friend and trusted colleague. Before my move to the Berman Institute, I was director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Minnesota, where I was also a professor in the Center as well as in the Medical School, and held the Maas Family Endowed Chair in Bioethics from the University. My career in bioethics began at the KIE and my experiences there and my degree from Georgetown allowed me to pursue an academic career in bioethics. I've been on the faculty at three other medical schools before coming to Johns Hopkins in 2011 (East Carolina University, and Medical College of Wisconsin before Minnesota), and had the honor of serving on the staff of a White House commission during the Clinton Administration (The White House Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments). My education at Georgetown was very much the launching point for my career, and I'm pleased to be back in the neighborhood. View Jeffrey Kahn's Homepage
Eran Klein, M.D., Ph.D.
Senior Scholar, Center for Ethics in Health Care, Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU); Clinical Instructor, Department of Neurology, OHSU; Staff Physician, Portand VA Medical Center
As part of Georgetown's combined MD/PhD program, I pursued a PhD in philosophy at Georgetown between the years 1997 and 2002. Though my interests tended toward the philosophy of medicine and bioethics, I chose to take a more inclusive approach to my degree and took a diverse set of courses. I was particularly influenced by work being done in the department at the time (by Mark Lance, Maggie Little, and Jonathan Dancy among others) on skills and epistemology. My dissertation, entitled "Toward a skills-based philosophy of medicine," was directed by Edmund Pellegrino and explored a broadly Heideggerian approach to problems in the philosophy of medicine. With the help of a fellow graduate student, Jennifer Walter, and the gracious support of Georgetown and its faculty (particularly those in the KIE), I organized a conference celebrating the Kennedy Institute of Ethics 30th anniversary with an examination of seminal works in bioethics. The conference, in turn, led to an edited volume published by Georgetown University Press (2003), The Story of Bioethics. I am currently a Greenwall Fellow in bioethics and health policy at Johns Hopkins and Georgetown. During my fellowship, I have worked broadly at the intersection of neurology, neuroscience, and philosophy. I have taught and written on issues related to the emergence of "neuroethics." I have also been particularly interested in normative issues in aging and cognitive impairment, including consent and assent for research, advance directives, decision-making capacity, and policy implications of patient financial incentive programs. I teach, practice neurology, and do research at the Portland VA Medical Center and at Oregon Health and Sciences University, where I previously completed a neurology residency. View Eran Klein's Homepage
Eric M. Meslin, Ph.D.
Director, Indiana University Center for Bioethics; Associate Dean for Bioethics, IU School of Medicine; Professor of Medicine, Medical & Molecular Genetics, Public Health, and Philosophy
I began my graduate student career at Georgetown in 1983, receiving my M.A. in 1985 and my Ph.D. in 1989. The KIE provided an environment more stimulating and intellectually challenging than any other I had experienced before – not just professors like Veatch, Pellegrino, Walters and Beauchamp – but fellow students many of whom are now friends and colleagues like Jeff Kahn, Eric Juengst, Ashby Sharpe, Bruce Weinstein, Rob Olick, Sue Rubin. I can still remember being gently but systematically critiqued by Tom Beauchamp in his Hume Seminar only to have a group of friends take me to the Tombs to recover. The mid-late 80s was a wonderful time to be a graduate student and Washington, D.C. was a wonderful place to begin a career that has taken me on a fantastic trip with several stops – I was the first (or one of the first) grad students to work at OPRR (later to become OHRP) courtesy of LeRoy Walter's contact with Charles McCarthy. I spent two years at the American Psychological Association developing their research ethics guidelines, then developed bioethics centers at the University of Toronto and at Oxford University before returning to NIH to take over from Eric Juengst at NHGRI’s ELSI Program. The four years running NBAC was a career highlight, but all good things come to an end (and Bush took the White House) so it was a perfect time to return to the academic world - I have been at Indiana University since 2001 when our center and its five faculty conduct ethics and policy research on a variety of topic focusing mostly on genetics, genomics, human subjects research, predictive health, science and technology policy and international health. View Eric Meslin's Homepage
Thaddeus Mason Pope, J.D., Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Law, Widener University
I arrived at Georgetown in 1992 to complete the joint J.D./Ph.D. in philosophy. I received my J.D. in 1997 and the Ph.D. in 2003. I wrote my dissertation, a conceptual and normative analysis of hard paternalism, under the direction of Tom Beauchamp. I wrote the bulk of that dissertation while working as a law firm associate in Beverly Hills. But I was always eager to find the requisite early morning and weekend writing time, to respond to Prof. Beauchamp's insightful and constructive criticism. I wrote a detailed account of my experience at the KIE in an article entitled "My Bioethics Education at Georgetown" (American Journal of Bioethics (2 (4), Fall 2002).
I am now teaching law at Widener University, where I teach Torts, End-of-Life Decisions Law, Healthcare Liability & Quality, and Healthcare Finance & Regulation. I publish in law reviews, medical journals, and bioethics journals. Recently, I have gotten more directly engaged with bioethics public policy, through arguing in court cases, testifying, and drafting regulations. View Thaddeus Pope's Homepage
Virginia Ashby Sharpe, Ph.D.
Medical Ethicist, National Center for Ethics in Health Care Veterans Health Administration 10E
I took a variety of excellent courses as part of my Ph.D. requirements at Georgetown and all of them contributed to my understanding of philosophical and bioethical traditions, methods, and problems. However, the most important parts of my graduate education were the research and writing for the dissertation (completed in 1991) and teaching as a graduate student assistant. These activities gave me the most experience in formulating questions, understanding the relevant literature, and communicating cogently with various audiences. I am now an ethicist on the staff of the Veterans Health Administration's National Center for Ethics in Health Care. At VHA I support policy development and implementation on a broad range of ethical issues including adverse event disclosure, conflicts of interest and professionalism, release of protected health information, and organ donation. I direct the VHA Pandemic Influenza Ethics Initiative, developing ethical guidance and resources for pandemic flu planning and response. I am a visiting scholar at Georgetown University where I teach courses in environmental ethics and clinical ethics. I am also an advisory board member to the Mothers and Newborns study at the Columbia Center for Children's Environmental Health. This community-based cohort study uses biomarker research and environmental monitoring to study the effects of several common pollutants on the health of children in Harlem and Washington Heights. Prior to my work at VHA, I was director of the Integrity in Science project at the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) and Deputy Director at the Hastings Center.
More than anything, my time at Georgetown taught me how to think critically and write clearly. View Ashby Sharpe's Homepage
Daniel Sulmasy, M.D., Ph.D.
Kilbride-Clinton Professor of Medicine and Ethics, Department of Medicine and Divinity School, University of Chicago; Associate Director, MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics; Member of the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues
The Georgetown education was outstanding. The department was balanced and provided a variety of philosophical approaches. This is a degree in philosophy with the possibility of specializing in bioethics, not a degree in "bioethics," which is a field of inquiry and not a discipline. I think the solid training in epistemology, metaphysics, and ethical theory are essential to doing good work in bioethics. I had a wonderful committee for my dissertation (completed in 1995) --Ed Pellegrino, a physician and one of the founders of the field of bioethics, John Langan, a Jesuit who knew Thomistic action theory, and Steve Kuhn, a logician who made sure I was minding my p's and q's.
I am now in an outstanding university with a deep commitment to interdisciplinarity and a clinical ethics center that has three MDs with PhDs in philosophy as associate directors. I spend 20% of my time in clinical work, and 80% in teaching and research. I consider philosophy my "basic science" and my scholarship to be a form of translational research. Georgetown prepared me exceptionally well for this. View Daniel Sulmasy's Medicine Homepage and Divinity Homepage
Jeremy Snyder, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Faculty of Health Sciences and Affiliate Member, Philosophy Department, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada
I entered the philosophy program at Georgetown University as a doctoral student in 2000 without a clear interest in studying applied ethics. I was exposed to the KIE early on, as much of my coursework was led by scholars affiliated with the KIE. These courses included Feminist Bioethics and Moral Particularism with Maggie Little (who would later become my dissertation adviser), Distributive Justice with Madison Powers, and Hume with Tom Beauchamp. As I was completing my coursework and transitioning into the dissertation-writing phase of my PhD, I began attending a series of seminars held jointly by the KIE, Johns Hopkins University, and the National Institutes of Health. These joint seminars included topics on Equality, Distributive Justice, and, what would later become the topic of my dissertation, exploitation. The opportunity to engage with leading scholars in applied ethics on a regular basis is almost impossible for graduate students outside of the KIE, and I was immensely impressed by the discussions that occurred in these seminars. As a result of these experiences, I decided to write a dissertation on exploitation, with applications to bioethics and business ethics. My dissertation required countless hours spent in the KIE library, with the support of the generous and enormously talented staff there. In short, the KIE, its scholars and staff, and all of the resources that it provides, were of enormous importance to my development as a scholar.
I have no doubt that the training I received through the KIE and the reputation of its scholars were instrumental in my ability to secure my current position in a tenure track job in the Faculty of Health Sciences at Simon Fraser University. I am now part of an interdisciplinary faculty where I teach and conduct research in population level ethics. I am the sole ethicist in my faculty and only person trained in philosophy. This situation has proven challenging, but the interdisciplinary engagement that I found at the KIE has been important to my ability to fill my new role outside of a philosophy department. As I learned during my job search, very few philosophy departments take applied ethics seriously and provide the scholarly expertise to train graduate students in applied ethics successfully. Through its association with the KIE, the philosophy department at Georgetown provided this training and allowed me to integrate successfully into a faculty that draws on a broad range of disciplinary backgrounds. I am grateful for my good fortune of being associated with the KIE as a graduate student and have no doubt that I would not have had the opportunity to work in my present fulfilling and exciting position otherwise. View Jeremy Snyder's Homepage