News

Mara Buchbinder has been awarded a grant from the Greenwall Foundation for her project, “The Pediatric Vaccine Encounter in a New Era: Identifying and Mitigating Ethical Challenges.” The project is a collaborative effort with Krista Perreira of UNC Social Medicine and Douglas Opel of Seattle Children’s Hospital, bringing together expertise across institutions...

Rebecca Walker has been named Interim External Chair of the Department of Communication, effective July 1. This appointment reflects her strong leadership, commitment to academic excellence, and dedication to fostering collaboration within and beyond the university community.

Rebecca Walker and two Philosophy undergraduate students, Fia Jurgens and Jordan Mull, have teamed up to win a William C. Friday Arts and Humanities Research Award for the 2026-2027 Academic Year for their work on “Philosophical Explorations of Moral Status and Diverse Intelligence.”

Our Center provides an academic home for the UNC Hospital Ethics Committee (HEC) and the Clinical Ethics Service. Ethics consult team members were happy to participate in the hospital’s Team Appreciation Week, joining colleagues across the Hospital and UNC School of Medicine in recognizing the people who make our shared mission possible. Anissa...

In this talk, Justin Clapp examines how familiar bioethics language—such as framing medical “decisions” around patients’ “values” and “preferences”—actually functions in real clinical settings, including surgical clinics and intensive care units. Drawing on ethnographic research, he illustrates how these concepts are often taken up in ways that diverge significantly from...

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...

On April 9, 2026, the Animal Studies Project, with support from the Center for Bioethics, Parr Center for Ethics, and Philosophy Department hosted a panel discussion on animal research featuring distinguished speakers discussing history, policy, and ethics on this complex topic. The panel was organized around the recent publication of...

The recording of The “Equitification” of Rights: How COVID-19 Rewrote the Story of Health and Human Rights is now available.

On February 18, the UNC community came together for the 47th Merrimon Lecture, featuring distinguished speaker Robert Califf, MD, MACC. His talk, “Can We Balance Professionalism with the Extreme Financial Focus of U.S. Healthcare?”, encouraged attendees to reflect on the growing tension between clinical professionalism and the increasingly complex financial...

Abstracts are now being accepted for the 7th ELSI Congress, which will be held on June 22 – 24, 2026 in Chapel Hill, NC. The submission period is January 16 – February 16. For over three decades, the National Human Genome Research Institute’s Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications (ELSI) Research...