The Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University is delighted to announce our Fellows-in-Residence for the 2019-20 academic year. 

In 2019-20, the Center will take up its new theme of the Ethics of Technological and Biomedical Innovation. Our goal for the next two years is to craft a conversation that will help us deepen our collective understanding of the short- and long-term issues emerging at the intersections of ethics, human rights, technology, and the frontiers of the biomedical and biotechnology sectors. We are especially interested in questions of access to these innovations and impacts on the health and welfare of vulnerable populations. To that end, we have launched exciting new joint fellowship programs with the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School, Harvard Medical School's Center for Bioethics, and a special AI Initiative Joint Fellowship with the Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence Initiative, a joint project of the MIT Media Lab and Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. 

Edmond J. Safra Fellows-in-Residence 2019-2020  

John Basl received his PhD in Philosophy from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2011. He has been a faculty member in the department of philosophy and religion at Northeastern University since 2013. Prior to that, he was a faculty member in the philosophy department at Bowling Green State University. His published work spans a variety of issues in applied ethics and moral philosophy with a focus on issues of moral status. His recent book, The Death of The Ethics of Life takes up issues in environmental ethics concerning the status of non-sentient life. During his time at the Center for Ethics, he will focus on developing oversight mechanisms to govern the development of emerging technologies. The primary aim of the project is to defend a committee-based approach to oversight and provide tools that institutions can use to deploy such oversight. Basl is an AI Initiative Joint Fellow-in-Residence.  

Adom Getachew is Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of Political Science and the College at the University of Chicago. She is a political theorist with research interests in the history of political thought, theories of race and empire, and postcolonial political theory. Her work focuses on the intellectual and political histories of Africa and the Caribbean. Her recent book, Worldmaking After Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination, reconstructs an account of self-determination offered in the political thought of Black Atlantic anticolonial nationalists during the height of decolonization in the twentieth century. Getachew holds a joint PhD in Political Science and African-American Studies from Yale University. 

Roni Hirsch received her PhD in Political Science at the University of California, Los Angeles in 2017, with a concentration in political theory and the history and philosophy of science. Before coming to Harvard, she was a resident fellow at the Center for the History of Political Economy at Duke University and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Tel Aviv University. She currently holds a postdoctoral research fellowship at the Polonsky Academy at the Van Leer Institute, Jerusalem. Hirsch's research takes a comparative look at the competing political-economic regimes of risk and property, and their implications for distributive justice. Her current manuscript, "The Price of Risk and Its Social Costs," examines the development of early financial theory alongside the regulation of American financial markets between 1920-1970, as the foundation for late twentieth century conceptions of justice and democratic citizenship. Hirsch is an Exchange Fellow-in-Residence from the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Tel Aviv University. 

Gregory Keating is the Maurice Jones, Jr. Class of 1925 Professor of Law and Philosophy at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law. He has a PhD from the Department of Politics at Princeton and a JD from Harvard. At USC he teaches torts, professional responsibility, and seminars in legal and political philosophy. After graduating from Harvard, he practiced law in Massachusetts for five years before entering law teaching. He has been a visiting professor at the Harvard and Yale Law Schools, at the Faculty of Jurisprudence at the University of Brescia in Italy, and at the Buchmann Faculty of Law in Israel. Keating edits a torts casebook and writes on torts and legal theory. He has published articles on the morality of reasonable risk imposition and the law of negligence more generally; on the history of and moral justification for strict liability in tort; on why justice requires that we take inefficiently great precaution against significant risks of death and devastating injury; and on issues of professional responsibility. At the Center for Ethics, Keating will be working on a book project, entitled Reasonableness and Risk, which attempts to extend a non-consequentialist moral framework to problems of accidental harm. The book seeks to show that it makes sense to think of our practices of risk imposition in terms of what we owe to each other as a matter of justice, and that so doing lends support to principles of precaution that consequentialists often dismiss as irrational. 

Meira Levinson is a political theorist by training, was a middle school teacher by vocation, and is currently Professor of Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Her books--which include No Citizen Left Behind, Making Civics Count, Dilemmas of Educational Ethics, and Democratic Discord in Schools--all strive to be accessible and relevant not only to scholars but also to educators, policymakers, students, and parents. She similarly seeks to provide practice-relevant scholarly resources through JusticeinSchools.org, YouthinFront.org, and Instructional Moves, an on-line initiative to improve higher education pedagogy. Levinson's current research focuses on constructing a field of educational ethics that is sufficiently rigorous and robust both to inform and be informed by educational practice, educational policy, and normative and social scientific scholarship. In line with this vision, Levinson looks forward to spending her fellowship year at the Center for Ethics completing a book manuscript about Theorizing Educational Ethics. She is particularly interested in working out the relationships among distributive justice, corrective ethics, and the construction of difference in educational settings, as well as in thinking through the relationship between educational ethics and the larger domains of both normative theory and public policy. She is also eager to learn from other fellows at the Center about intersections among educational ethics, bioethics, and the ethics of technological innovation. 

Anna Lewis completed her PhD in Systems Biology at the University of Oxford in 2012 and has since been working in the genetics industry in the San Francisco Bay Area as a computational biologist and product manager. Day to day confrontation with ethical issues led her to want to pursue these questions full time. Her interests cover how ethics should be incorporated into scientific and technological development, but also how and whether new technologies will impact our ethical thinking. She has published empirical work on how the prospect of genetic modification can impact our sense of fairness. While at the Center for Ethics she will be focused on ethical issues arising from the recent predictive turn in genomics, whereby polygenic scores are designed that reflect our predispositions for disease, for academic achievement, for violence. These developments come in the context of predictions being made about us in all aspects of our lives. Lewis is an Edmond J. Safra/HMS Center for Bioethics Joint Fellow-in-Residence. 

Attila Mraz holds a PhD in political philosophy from Central European University (Budapest). His research revolves around three overarching themes in democratic theory and the theory of rights: (1) How could political equality, fundamental participatory rights and individual liberties be reconciled with competent political decision-making? What legal and moral obligations should politicians, the press and citizens have in a democracy to ensure that voters and those who hold public power make competent decisions? (2) What are the justification, content and limits of the fundamental right to political participation? (3) What is the relation between private legal entitlements and political freedoms? How far can the former be used in the service of exercising the latter? If they conflict, which one should prevail? In his doctoral thesis, connecting the first and second themes above, he focused on the justifications of competence-based restrictions on the right to vote, and argued for the unique potential of liberal democracies to reconcile political equality and the fundamental right to vote with high quality political decision-making. He was a Balzan Fellow at New York University, pursued research at the University of Arizona and as an Eötvös Fellow at the University of Warwick, and he was a visiting lecturer at CEU's Department of Political Science. He held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Tel Aviv University's Buchmann Faculty of Law, where he focused within the third theme above on the proper limits of the engagement of for-profit corporations in democratic political life. Mraz is an Exchange Fellow-in-Residence from the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Tel Aviv University. 

Naomi Scheinerman will receive her PhD from the Department of Political Science at Yale University in 2019. Her research explores avenues for democratic participation in regulating new and emerging biotechnologies, including gene editing tools and artificial wombs, as well as artificial intelligence applications and algorithmic designs. She shows that including randomly selected bodies of lay individuals within administrative agencies' rule-making process results in policies that are better informed, mitigate abuse and domination of vulnerable populations, and instill trust in the resulting policy. Though grounded in political and democratic theory and political philosophy, her approach is necessarily interdisciplinary, engaging in the fields of ethics and moral philosophy, epistemology, philosophy of science, law, and policy. Scheinerman also writes for The Genetic Literacy Project and has taught for Yale's Summer Institute in Bioethics. Prior to arriving at Yale, Scheinerman worked as a research assistant at The Hastings Center, a bioethics research institute, and attended the University of Michigan. Scheinerman is an AI Initiative Joint Fellow-in-Residence. 

Jacob S. Sherkow is Professor of Law at the Innovation Center for Law and Technology at New York Law School, with joint appointments at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health and the Center for Advanced Studies in Biomedical Innovation Law at the University of Copenhagen. His research focuses on how scientific advances affect law, regulation, and bioethics. Sherkow is the author of over 40 articles on these topics in both scientific journals and traditional law reviews, including Science, Nature, the Yale Law Journal, and the Stanford Law Review; his work has won multiple prizes. In 2018, he was appointed to the National Academy of Medicine as an Emerging Leader in Health and Medicine. Sherkow is a graduate of the University of Michigan Law School as well as Columbia and McGill Universities. Sherkow is an Edmond J. Safra/Petrie-Flom Joint Fellow-in-Residence. 

Deva Woodly is Associate Professor of Politics at The New School. A former fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study (2012-2013), she is the author of The Politics of Common Sense: How Social Movements Use Public Discourse to Change Politics and Win Acceptance (Oxford 2015). Her research covers a variety of topics, from media & communication, to social movements, race and imagination, and political understandings of economics. In each case, she focuses on the impacts of public discourse on the political understandings of social and economic issues as well as how those common understandings change democratic practice and public policy. Woodly's process of inquiry is inductive, moving from concrete, real-world conditions to the conceptual implications of those realities. In all cases, she centers the perspective of ordinary citizens and political challengers with an eye toward how the demos impacts political action and shapes political possibilities. Woodly's current book projects are #BlackLivesMatter and the Democratic Necessity of Social Movements, an examination of the ways that social movements re-politicize public life in times of political despair, and What We Talk About When We Talk About the Economy, a broad investigation of American economic discourse and its implications for politics and policy in the post-Great Recession era.  

The Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, established in 1986, is one of Harvard University's interfaculty initiatives under the auspices of the Provost's Office. It seeks to strengthen teaching and research about pressing ethical issues; to foster sound norms of ethical reasoning and civic discussion; and to share the work of our community in the public interest.