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I am happy to announce that after 11 years as Director of the UNC Center for Bioethics, I am turning over that leadership role to Arlene Davis, RN, JD, effective July 1, 2021.

It has been immensely fulfilling to oversee the flourishing of the C:B over the last decade. I am deeply grateful to the Center faculty and staff whose energy and collegiality have fueled our emergence as a home for first-class research, teaching, and service in bioethics, and I am so proud to see our mentees seeding and reshaping the field, nationally and internationally.  Moreover, we could not have hoped for a better foundation than our institutional context in the Department of Social Medicine,  with the Center for Health Equity Research and the Center for Genomics and Society as our neighbors and collaborators.

Now, I look forward to doing more to add my own scholarship to this mix as a member of the faculty and letting someone else take the wheel as we move into our second decade.

Fortunately, that someone will be Arlene Davis, RN, JD, who is well known to our newsletter readers as the director of our Clinical Ethics Program and long-term co-chair of the UNC Health System’s Hospital Ethics Committee.  Arlene joined the UNC School of Medicine faculty in 1998,  and her wide, deep network of clinical ethics collaborations across the UNC Health System and the UNC Health Affairs campus has been invaluable in fostering goodwill amongst our health professional colleagues and opening doors for the Center programming.  She knows the ropes of cultivating ethics work in academic medical settings, and she is a sought-after teacher and advisor across the waterfront of issues in clinical, research, and public health ethics.  In particular, Arlene’s expertise, experience, and outlook equips her especially well to guide us as the field of bioethics turns more towards institutional and systemic issues of social justice in biomedicine.

Please join me in congratulating Arlene on her selection as our next Director, and stay tuned to hear from her in the months to come about the interesting new ideas she has for us here at UNC!

Eric Juengst