The Hastings Center is pleased to announce the election of the 2023 fellows. Hastings Center fellows are a group of more than 200 individuals of outstanding accomplishment whose work has informed scholarship and public understanding of complex ethical issues in health, health care, science, and technology. The latest fellows focus on a broad range of topics with ethical implications, including digital technologies, public health, disparities at the end of life, disability rights, institutional racism, pain and addiction, and climate change.
Mara Buchbinder, PhD, is professor and vice chair of social medicine and an adjunct professor of anthropology at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, as well as core faculty in the UNC Center for Bioethics. She is a medical anthropologist with broad interests in cultures of health, illness, and medicine in the United States. Her recent work focuses on how patients, families, and health care providers navigate social and ethical challenges resulting from changes in medical technology, law, and health policy. She is the principal investigator of STEPPS, the Study to Examine Physicians’ Pandemic Stress, a qualitative study of frontline physicians in four U.S. cities who cared for hospitalized Covid-19 patients during the pandemic. She is also the co-principal investigator of CORE-ICU: Clinical and Organizational Resilience in the ICU, which will investigate how organizational factors contribute to burnout in ICU clinicians and adverse outcomes in patients with acute respiratory failure. Dr. Buchbinder’s newest book, Scripting Death: Stories of Assisted Dying in America, chronicles two years of ethnographic research documenting the implementation of Vermont’s Patient Choice and Control at End-of-Life Act. Dr. Buchbinder is also the author of All in Your Head: Making Sense of Pediatric Pain, co-author (with Stefan Timmermans) of Saving Babies? The Consequences of Newborn Genetic Screening, co-editor of Understanding Health Inequalities and Justice: Bridging Perspectives for New Conversations, and co-editor of the two-volume series The Social Medicine Reader, 3rd edition.