Bioethics in the Margins

In this episode, Dr. Chuang discusses some of her research, which has focused on racial disparities in health care delivery. She shares her journey to this topic starting with her childhood experiences as a witness to structural racism and implicit bias. She discusses how bias and structural inequities are reproduced in many ways, all affecting health and healthcare outcomes. Her work includes sev...

For this episode, we are joined by Kadija Ferryman, an anthropologist who studies equity and policy in health risk prediction technologies. Dr. Ferryman is Faculty at the Berman Institute of Bioethics and Assistant Professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Dr. Ferryman traces her path into studying technology through a cultu...

In this episode, we are joined by Dr. Katherine Peeler, founding director of the Peeler Immigration Lab, to discuss her longstanding empirical work on human rights and US immigration systems. Dr. Peeler is an Associate Physician in Pediatrics at the Boston Children's Hospital and Assistant Professor of Pediatrics, Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. She is a faculty member...

In this episode, our previous guest Dr. Daphne Martschenko returns with her co-author Dr. Sam Trejo to discuss their new book What We Inherit: How New Technologies and Old Myths Are Shaping Our Genomic Future. Dr. Martschenko is an Assistant Professor at the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics, where she studies how to promote ethical and socially responsible conduct in human genetics and engage...

Season 9 is off to an exceptionally strong start with our recent discussion with Dr. Nicholas Freudenberg, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Public Health at the City University of New York (CUNY) School of Public Health. Dr. Freudenberg is Senior Faculty Fellow and co-founder of the CUNY Urban Food Policy Institute ( www.cunyurbanfoodpolicy.org ). He is a leading expert in Commercial Determinan...

We close out Season 8 with a very special episode that is particularly poignant in this holiday season when people of many faiths are called to reflect on our core values. We are joined by Reverend Jackson who is currently the Associate Conference Minister for Justice and Witness Ministries in the Central Atlantic Conference in the United Church of Christ. Reverend Jackson has been the pastor at t...

This month we are joined by Dr. Karen Meagher, Assistant Professor of Health Justice and Bioethics at the Lewis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University. Recently, Dr. Meagher was the Associate Director of public engagement in the Biomedical Ethics Research Program at the Mayo Clinic. Her research focuses on public health ethics and social implications of advances in microbial and human geneti...

We are thrilled that this podcast is airing right after the 2025 American Society for Bioethics and Humanities meeting. It is based on a 2024 ASBH workshop “Remaking Bioethics Together.” Our guests are Stephen Molldrem, PhD, assistant professor and the research program director in Bioethics and Health Humanities at the University of Texas Medical Branch School of Public and Population Health, Kris...

We welcome everyone back from a beautiful summer to kick off Season 8 with Julia O'Brien, the "grandmother" of geographic information systems (GIS). O'Brien was the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Region II Special Geospacial Coordinator before her retirement in 2023. She worked in remote sensing and GIS for over 30 years. Before that she was the Senior Project Manager for a New York Ci...

This episode of Bioethics in the Margins features a panel of bioethicists: Danielle Pacia of The Hastings Center, Sana Baban of UMass Chan Medical School, J. Wesley Boyd of Harvard Medical School, and Ryan Dougherty of Kaiser Permanente. They are the co-authors of a national survey exploring the role of social justice in their field, published in the American Journal of Bioethics: Empirical Bioeth...

Dr. Carlos Smith, a general dentist and ethicist, is the Associate Dean of Ethics and Community Engagement and an Associate Professor in the Department of Dental Public Health and Policy at Virginia Commonwealth University School of Dentistry. His work focuses on professional identity formation, dental ethics, and oral health justice. In this episode, Dr. Smith discusses his unique path blending d...

In this episode of Bioethics in the Margins, we delve into the topic of capital punishment by nitrogen gas. Dr. Robert Glatter is Editor at Large for Medscape Emergency Medicine and Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine at Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell. Dr. Peter Papadakos is Professor of Anesthesiology, Surgery, Neurology and Neurosurgery at the University of Rochester, and a...

Our first ever repeat guest is Rachel Fabi, PhD, Associate Professor of Bioethics and Humanities at SUNY Upstate Medical University. She is a Faculty Research Affiliate at the Syracuse University Lerner Center for Public Health Promotion. She received her Ph. D. in Health Policy and Management, in the Bioethics and Health Policy track, at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and se...

In this episode, we are joined by Dr. Tanya Zakrison, MD, PhD, Professor of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery and Director of Critical Trauma Research at the University of Chicago Medical Center. Her work focuses on the connection between interpersonal trauma, critical race theory and racial capitalism. In this podcast, Dr. Zakrison shares how her personal experiences in young adulthood helped her mak...

Dr. Shameka Poetry Thomas is a medical sociologist with special interest in reproductive justice and genetics technology as well as the intersection of maternal healthcare with sickle cell disease. After receiving her Ph. D. from the University of Miami, she completed her two-year postdoctoral fellowship at the National Institutes of Health (NIH)/National Human Genomics Research Institutes (NHGRI)...

Happy holidays from BITM! We are delighted to share this episode with you this week. Kirk and Amelia sat down with Dr. Donald Carter III, assistant professor at Mercer School of Medicine. Dr. Carter earned his Doctorate in Bioethics from Loyola University after earning a Masters in Divinity from Vanderbilt and an MBA from Tennessee State. He is a Sadler Scholar with the Hastings Center and the co-...

We are so excited to have our very first librarian, Laureen Cantwell-Jurkovic, on the show to discuss the impact of and potential responses to the onslaught of book challenges and bans that have exponentially increased since 2022. Dr. Cantwell-Jurkovic is head of access services and outreach at Colorado Mesa University. She has researched and published on information literacy instruction and criti...

We are back with season 7, chatting with Brian Tuohy, PhD, a sociologist of immigration and health, assistant professor of bioethics, and co-director of education at the Lewis Katz School of of Medicine at Temple University. We use the lens of immigrant health to delve into some deeper questions like "What does bioethics mean?" Dr. Tuohy generously shares his own personal and professional journey...

In this episode, Kirk and Amelia speak with Asha Hassan, MPH, a doctoral candidate at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health. Together, they discuss her recent work on the link between exposure to tear gas during the 2020 protests for racial justice and consequent reproductive health issues. Asha explores the lack of sufficient policy innovation about banning chemical agents in protes...

In this episode, Amelia and Kirk speak with Lynette Martins who is co-leader of the ASBH immigration affinity group with Dr. Brian Tuohy and a recent graduate from Georgetown Law’s O’Neill Institute in national and global health law. Ms. Martins highlights the importance of Medical-Legal Partnerships in identifying and addressing both direct and indirect impacts that legal issues and policy have o...

In this episode, Kirk and Amelia speak with Dr. Deepshikha Ashana about her research on racial disparities present in shared decision-making practices in critical care. Dr. Ashana shares how her research interests were motivated by her personal observations of racial disparities, from her childhood in India, her experience moving to the US, and her education in Philadelphia. Her recent research th...

Amelia and Kirk chat with Dr. Mark Kuczewski, Professor of Medical Ethics at Loyola University, Chicago. In this episode, they discuss his recent article https://www.healthaffairs.org/content/forefront/nonprofit-health-care-behaves-badly-case-mission-leaders-ombudsmen in which Dr. Kuczewski elucidates the challenges nonprofit healthcare employees face as workplace culture becomes increasingly corp...

Kirk and Amelia had the pleasure of speaking with Dr. Anita L. Allen, the Henry R. Silverman Professor of Law and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania. In this episode, they discuss Dr. Allen’s experiences working on President Obama’s Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues  where she engaged in deliberative democracy approaches to explore challenges wi...

Dr. Stephen Hargarten is a Professor of Emergency Medicine, Associate Dean for Global Health, Director of the Global Health Pathway, and Director of the Comprehensive Injury Center at the Medical College of Wisconsin. His research interests reflect an intersection of injury and violence prevention and health policy to address the burden of this biosocial disease. He was the founding President of t...

Amelia and Kirk have a broad-ranging discussion with Adira Hulkower, the Director of Clinical Ethics at the Montefiore Einstein Center for Bioethics in the Bronx. She shares her experiences as a clinical ethics consultant applying the concept of Dignity of Risk to better understand the ethical implications of discharge planning for patients experiencing homelessness. They discuss healthcare instit...