Events
3600 Civic Center Blvd., 8-031 (hybrid)
Penn Bioethics Seminar (PBS): "Setting Priorities in Allocating Scarce Health Resources" - Ole F. Norheim, MD
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2026-10-27 12:00:00
2026-10-27 13:00:00
America/New_York
Penn Bioethics Seminar (PBS): "Setting Priorities in Allocating Scarce Health Resources" - Ole F. Norheim, MD
Setting Priorities in Allocating Scarce Health Resources
Ole F. Norheim, MD
Mary B. Saltonstall Professor of Ethics and Population Health
Global Health and Population, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
Health systems everywhere face the same hard question: how should limited resources be allocated when needs exceed budgets? In this talk, Professor Ole F. Norheim examines the ethical foundations of priority setting in health care and the practical tools available to decision makers. Drawing on decades of work in global health and in Norway, he explores how evidence and economic analysis can inform efficient, fair and transparent priority setting.
Norheim argues that efficiency alone is insufficient. Ethical principles, including giving priority to the worse off and reducing unjust health inequalities, must be embedded in policy frameworks. He discusses how severity of illness, lifetime health prospects, and distributive justice can be operationalized alongside cost-effectiveness thresholds to guide real-world decisions.
Streaming available via Zoom.
3600 Civic Center Blvd., 8-031 (hybrid)
Penn Medical Ethics
3600 Civic Center Blvd., 6-031 (Hybrid)
Research Ethics & Policy Series (REPS): Rebecca Ahrens-Nicklas / Kiran Musunuru
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2026-11-10 12:00:00
2026-11-10 13:00:00
America/New_York
Research Ethics & Policy Series (REPS): Rebecca Ahrens-Nicklas / Kiran Musunuru
Individualized Genetic Interventions
Rebecca Ahrens-Nicklas, MD, PhD
Associate Professor, Pediatrics (Human Genetics)
Director, Gene Therapy for Inherited Metabolic Disorders Frontier Program
Children's Hospital of Philadelphia
Kiran Musunuru, MD, PhD, MPH, ML, MRA
Barry J. Gertz Professor for Translational Research
Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania
co-director, penn medicine/chop orphan disease center
scientific director, center for cardiovascular disease
Individualized genetic interventions are creating new possibilities for treating patients with rare and ultra-rare genetic diseases, including conditions for which conventional drug development is neither feasible nor economically viable. Advances in gene editing and other programmable genetic technologies increasingly allow therapies to be designed for individual patients based on their specific pathogenic variants. Yet the promise of these approaches raises thorny ethical questions.
How should risks and potential benefits be assessed when clinical experience is limited or nonexistent? What constitutes adequate evidence of safety and efficacy for a treatment designed for a single patient? How should informed consent address uncertainty and the potential for therapeutic misconception? And how should responsibilities for manufacturing, oversight, long-term monitoring, and equitable access be allocated among investigators, clinicians, institutions, regulators, and families? In this seminar, we will explore these questions through the emerging practice of individualized genetic medicine, examining how traditional research ethics frameworks may need to evolve while preserving meaningful protections for patients.
Registration required; Lunch provided.
Streaming available via Zoom.
3600 Civic Center Blvd., 6-031 (Hybrid)
Penn Medical Ethics
CCB 08-031, 8th Floor, 3600 Civic Center Blvd. (Note: Virtual attendees can join by accessing this link: https://upenn.zoom.us/j/95740259034.)
Health Policy Research Seminar: Jisung Park, PhD, MSc
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2026-11-12 10:00:00
2026-11-12 11:00:00
America/New_York
Health Policy Research Seminar: Jisung Park, PhD, MSc
"Local Labor Market Conditions and Adaptation to Climate Change: The Role of Workers' Outside Options."
Extreme heat is a growing occupational health hazard, yet little is known about what determines whether workplaces adapt to it. Using administrative data on 15 million workers' compensation injury claims and measures of workers' outside options in more than 17,000 local occupational labor markets, this talk shows that a day above 90°F raises workplace injuries by 9 percent, and that plausibly exogenous improvements in workers' outside option wages substantially reduce this effect: a one standard deviation increase in outside option wages lowers the heat-injury relationship by 46 to 64 percent, including in many indoor settings. The findings suggest that local labor market conditions shape how well workers are protected from environmental health risks, and who bears the costs of adaptation.
Dr. R. Jisung Park is an environmental and labor economist interested broadly in how environmental factors shape economic opportunity. Prior to joining Penn, he was a member of the faculty at UCLA, and a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard. Dr. Park’s research combines data, quasi-experimental methods, and economic analysis to better understand the implications of environmental change for human flourishing, and how effective policy responses may be designed. For instance, his work on heat and learning uses data from millions of test scores to understand how the physical environment in which learning occurs may affect educational achievement gaps, how climate change may influence economic inequality, and what this might imply for public policy regarding climate mitigation and adaptation. Ongoing work examines such topics as the effects of extreme heat on workers and labor market inequality, the consequences of natural disasters for human capital, and the process by which workers and firms adapt to a changing environment. Dr. Park received a PhD in economics from Harvard University, where he was an NSF Fellow, and master’s degrees in Environmental Change and Management (MSc) and Development Economics (MSc) from the University of Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. His work has been published in the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, the Journal of Human Resources, Nature Human Behavior, Nature Energy, and the Review of Environmental Economics and Policy, and is widely cited in such media outlets as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, the Washington Post, the BBC, the Guardian, the Financial Times, and NPR. Dr. Park has also advised policymakers and practitioners including in the form of Congressional Testimony for the U.S. House of Representatives, and briefings for the United Nations, the World Bank, the U.S. Department of Commerce, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Department of Labor, the California State Legislature, the United Kingdom Department for International Development, United Technologies, UBS, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
CCB 08-031, 8th Floor, 3600 Civic Center Blvd. (Note: Virtual attendees can join by accessing this link: https://upenn.zoom.us/j/95740259034.)
Penn Medical Ethics
3600 Civic Center Blvd., 8-031 (hybrid)
Penn Bioethics Seminar (PBS): "Public Health, Ethics, and Repetitive Brain Trauma in Youth Sports" - Kathleen Bachynski, PhD, MPH
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2026-11-17 12:00:00
2026-11-17 13:00:00
America/New_York
Penn Bioethics Seminar (PBS): "Public Health, Ethics, and Repetitive Brain Trauma in Youth Sports" - Kathleen Bachynski, PhD, MPH
Public Health, Ethics, and Repetitive Brain Trauma in Youth Sports
Kathleen Bachynski, PhD, MPH
Associate Professor, Public Health
Muhlenberg College
Many popular youth sports in the United States involve exposure to repetitive brain trauma, raising major ethical challenges. Kathleen Bachynski will discuss youth tackle football as a case study, drawing on research from her book No Game for Boys to Play: The History of Youth Football and the Origins of a Public Health Crisis. When and how can foreseeable brain injury risks in sports be ethically justified, and what are our goals for youth sports programs?
3600 Civic Center Blvd., 8-031 (hybrid)
Penn Medical Ethics
VIRTUAL, via Zoom
Penn Bioethics Seminar (PBS): "A Call to Decommodify Health Care" - Kevin Fiscella, MD, MPH
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2026-12-01 12:00:00
2026-12-01 13:00:00
America/New_York
Penn Bioethics Seminar (PBS): "A Call to Decommodify Health Care" - Kevin Fiscella, MD, MPH
A Call to Decommodify Health Care
Kevin Fiscella, MD, MPH
Professor, Family Medicine
Co-Director, Research Division
Department of Family Medicine
University of Rochester
Dr. Fiscella is co-director of the Research Division in the Department of Family Medicine, Co-Director of the Rochester Center for Communication and Disparities Research, Co-Director of the Greater Rochester Practice-Based Research Network, and Co-Director of Equity-focused Dissemination and Implementation at the University of Rochester Clinical & Translational Sciences Institute.
His research focuses on pragmatic strategies to improve equity within primary care related to prevention including cancer, cardiovascular disease prevention and HIV.
More detail to follow.
Streaming available via Zoom.
VIRTUAL, via Zoom
Penn Medical Ethics
To be added to MEHP's events listserv, please contact lisa.bailey@pennmedicine.upenn.edu.