The UNC Center for Bioethics hosted a regional bioethics workshop on Friday, April 10, 2026. Participants came from North Carolina institutions, including Duke University, Eastern Carolina University, the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIH), North Carolina State University, UNC-Charlotte, and Wake Forest University.
The event focused on participants’ works in progress and gave them the opportunity to present their research as part of a panel session, flash presentations, or concurrent round tables. The panel session featured Maureen Kelley (Wake Forest University), Lisa Rasmussen (UNC-Charlotte), and Devin Lane (UNC-Chapel Hill). Dr. Kelley presented on moral distress and the duty of care in global health research, highlighting her collaborative research in Kenya, South Africa, and Thailand to show that “Current research ethics guidance is not very good at guiding research teams on how to respond to vulnerabilities of daily living or structural sources of vulnerability.” Also grappling with research ethics issues, Dr. Rasmussen presented on “stateless science,” or research that is not subject to regulation but that nonetheless raises important ethical issues. She discussed the type of framework needed to address ethics for such research and the practical constraints to make it effective. Finally, Mr. Lane shared his work on the epistemic conditions on permissible vaccine mandates, concluding that a vaccine mandate is “morally permissible only if actual people are in a position to rationally have sufficiently high confidence that a vaccine is safe and effective” while also acknowledging the obstacles to achieving this condition.
Flash presentations covered the following wide range of topics:
- scientists’ lack of public engagement in communicating complex—and ethically problematic—research findings (Margaret Waltz),
- mental health and work-related wellbeing among OB-GYNs Post-Dobbs (Mara Buchbinder),
- the potential for chatbots to counter misinformation and improve patient-clinician communication (Zubin Master),
- the barriers to participation of adult patients under guardianship in their own healthcare decisions (Arlene Davis),
- the need for better mechanisms to assess public health initiatives given that such programs are “rarely all out successes and failures” but may nevertheless guide policy decisions (Stuart Rennie), and
- the need for bioethics to consider reparations as an ethical imperative to confront and redress the deleterious health impacts of the criminal legal system (Tasseli McKay).
The round table discussions were organized around four topics and included four presentations each:
- Clinical Ethics (Jill Fisher, Daniel Moseley, Rimma Osipov, and Rebecca Walker)
- Reproductive Ethics (Karey Harwood, Annie Lyerly & Suzanne Day, Janet Malek, and Asha Talati)
- Technology and Ethics (Clint Parker, David Resnik, Shaun Respess, and William Smith)
- Methods in/of Ethics (Jean Cadigan, Eric Juengst, Jack Harris, and Patrick T. Smith)
This highly engaging workshop created the opportunity not only to present works in progress but also to network with other bioethics scholars in North Carolina. Many participants expressed enthusiasm to hold similar workshops at UNC or one of the other represented institutions in the future.
The event was co-sponsored by the UNC Department of Social Medicine and the Parr Center for Ethics.
