Hybrid: RCH B102AB, Richards Bldg., 3700 Hamilton Walk (and virtual via Zoom)
Hybrid-Research Ethics and Policy Series (REPS): The 4 R’s Formula for Community Participatory Research - Dr. Alvin C. Hathaway, Sr.
Learn More
2025-09-09 12:00:00
2025-09-09 13:00:00
America/New_York
Hybrid-Research Ethics and Policy Series (REPS): The 4 R’s Formula for Community Participatory Research - Dr. Alvin C. Hathaway, Sr.
The 4 R's Formula for Community Participatory Research
Dr. Alvin C. Hathaway, Sr.
Co-Founder, African Ancestry Neuroscience Research Initiative (AANRI)
Dr. Alvin C. Hathaway Sr. has refined a simple yet powerful formula for authentic community participatory research — Recognition, Respect, Relationship, and Results.
Recognition – Acknowledge the history, culture, and lived experience of the community as a source of knowledge equal to academic expertise.
Respect – Ensure that every voice is valued, perspectives are honored, and cultural norms are observed throughout the research process.
Relationship – Build trust through sustained engagement, transparency, and mutual benefit, ensuring that collaboration is genuine rather than extractive.
Results – Deliver tangible, measurable benefits to the community, from improved health outcomes to lasting policy change.
Dr. Hathaway has embedded this 4 R’s approach into diverse research initiatives, including neuroscience studies, faith-based healthy heart programs, clinical trials, and the Black Men’s Brain Health project. In every case, the formula ensures that research is not done to the community but done with the community — producing both rigorous science and transformative impact.
Founded in 2019, the African Ancestry Neuroscience Research Initiative (AANRI) is a groundbreaking collaboration between African American community leaders in Baltimore, the Lieber Institute for Brain Development, and Morgan State University that aims to address and rectify longstanding disparities in neuroscience research.
~ Dr. Hathaway’s visit is co-sponsored by the Penn Neurology / Community and Social Action Committee (CASA)
Streaming available via Zoom.
Registration required - lunch provided.
Hybrid: RCH B102AB, Richards Bldg., 3700 Hamilton Walk (and virtual via Zoom)
Penn Medical Ethics
1104 Blockley Hall (Note: Virtual attendees can join by accessing this link: https://upenn.zoom.us/j/95353951407.)
Health Policy Research Seminar: Anjali Adukia, EdD, Assistant Professor of Public Policy, University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy
Learn More
2025-09-11 12:00:00
2025-09-11 13:00:00
America/New_York
Health Policy Research Seminar: Anjali Adukia, EdD, Assistant Professor of Public Policy, University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy
Topic: "Separation of Church and State Curricula? Examining Public and Religious Private School Textbooks."
Abstract: Curricula impart knowledge, instill values, and shape collective memory. Despite growing public funding for religious schools through U.S. school choice programs, little is known about what they teach. We examine textbooks from public schools, religious private schools, and home schools, applying computational methods–including AI tools–to measure the presence and portrayal of people, topics, and values over time. Despite narratives of political polarization, our findings reveal few meaningful differences between public school textbooks from Texas and California. However, religious school textbooks have less female representation, feature lighter-skinned individuals, and portray topics like evolution and religion differently. Over one-third of pages in each collection convey character values, with a higher proportion in religious school textbooks. Important similarities also emerge: all textbook collections rarely include LGBTQIA+ discussion, portray females in more positive but less active or powerful contexts than males, and depict the U.S. founding era and slavery in similar contexts.
Bio: Anjali Adukia is an assistant professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy and the director of the MiiE Lab (Messages, Identity, and Inclusion in Education). In her work, she seeks to understand how children from all backgrounds can have opportunities to realize their potential. Adukia's work draws on large-scale data, often deriving data from previously unused and underused sources, including employing artificial intelligence (AI) methods to expand the tools and data used in social science.
Adukia has received an NSF CAREER Award in economics (2024-2029), the SREE Early Career Award (2023), the William T. Grant Foundation Scholar Award (2018-2023), the NAEd/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship (2018), and an Institute of Education Sciences grant (2020-2022). Her doctoral thesis won best dissertation awards from APPAM and AEFP. Her research has received awards from Google and has been featured in media outlets such as Scientific American, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Education Week, School Library Journal, and NPR.
Adukia is a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) in the Economics of Education and Children and Families groups, a research fellow at the IZA Institute of Labor Economics, a non-resident fellow at the Center for Global Development, an affiliate of the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD), and a faculty affiliate of the University of Chicago Education Lab. She is on the editorial boards of Education Finance and Policy, Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness, and Journal of Social Computing (IEEE). She co-organizes the annual AI in Social Sciences conference at The University of Chicago. She completed her doctoral degree at Harvard University, with a focus on the economics of education. She has a masters of education from Harvard University and a bachelor of science degree in molecular and integrative physiology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
1104 Blockley Hall (Note: Virtual attendees can join by accessing this link: https://upenn.zoom.us/j/95353951407.)
Penn Medical Ethics
Hybrid: RCH B102AB, Richards Bldg., 3700 Hamilton Walk (and virtual via Zoom)
Hybrid-Research Ethics and Policy Series (REPS): Evolving Ethical Challenges in Decentralized Clinical Trials - Effy Vayena, PhD
Learn More
2025-10-07 12:00:00
2025-10-07 13:00:00
America/New_York
Hybrid-Research Ethics and Policy Series (REPS): Evolving Ethical Challenges in Decentralized Clinical Trials - Effy Vayena, PhD
Evolving Ethical Challenges in Decentralized Clinical Trials
Effy Vayena, PhD
Professor of Bioethics
Associate Vice President for Digital Transformation & Governance
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETHZ)
Decentralized clinical trials (DCTs) have gained significant traction, especially following the COVID-19 pandemic. These trials rely on digital technologies and remote patient monitoring, promising to reach more diverse patient groups while reducing costs and accelerating research. Drawing on data from current DCTs, Dr. Vayena will present the evolution of the DTC landscape over the past few years. While highlighting the benefits of DCTs, the presentation will focus on the ethical challenges they raise as they are adopted across various fields of clinical research. Dr. Vayena will explore how these challenges have evolved over the past five years and propose directions for addressing them. By examining the intersection of ethics, clinical trials, and digital health technologies, Dr. Vayena aims to offer a better understanding of the complexities involved in conducting ethical decentralized clinical trials and guide future research practices.
Registration Required. Lunch provided.
Streaming available via Zoom.
Hybrid: RCH B102AB, Richards Bldg., 3700 Hamilton Walk (and virtual via Zoom)
Penn Medical Ethics
1104 Blockley Hall (Note: Virtual attendees can join by accessing this link: https://upenn.zoom.us/j/95353951407.)
Health Policy Research Seminar: Diane Alexander, PhD, Assistant Professor of Health Care Management, the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania
Learn More
2025-10-08 12:00:00
2025-10-08 13:00:00
America/New_York
Health Policy Research Seminar: Diane Alexander, PhD, Assistant Professor of Health Care Management, the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania
Topic: "Selection into Mediicine."
A talk abstract will be provided shortly.
Diane Alexander is an Assistant Professor of Health Care Management at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research is predominantly in health care, studying the economics of the provision of health care services and the actions of health care providers. More broadly, she is also interested in the interactions between environmental policies and health, as well as between health care and education. Her work has been featured in media outlets including the Washington Post, Bloomberg, CityLab, Vox, and Scientific American, as well as podcasts such as Freakonomics radio and Vox’s The Weeds.
She has studied the roles played by new types of providers in health care delivery, focusing on retail and urgent care clinics; the role of nurse practitioners and physician assistants in access and health; and how payment incentives influence physician decision-making. In a strand of work focusing on the interaction of environment and place on health outcomes, she has studied the role of residential segregation in explaining persistent racial health disparities, and the effect of pollution on health, utilizing the excess diesel emissions from the Volkswagen emissions cheating scandal as a natural experiment.
Prior to joining Wharton, Alexander was an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. She received a B.A. in economics from the University of California at Berkeley and a Ph.D. in economics from Princeton University.
1104 Blockley Hall (Note: Virtual attendees can join by accessing this link: https://upenn.zoom.us/j/95353951407.)
Penn Medical Ethics
Hybrid: 1402 Blockley Hall, 423 Guardian Drive (and virtual via Zoom)
Hybrid-Penn Bioethics Seminar Series (PBS): "The Other Disabled President: JFK’s Chronic Back Pain and Cover Up"- Beth Linker, PhD
Learn More
2025-10-14 12:00:00
2025-10-14 13:00:00
America/New_York
Hybrid-Penn Bioethics Seminar Series (PBS): "The Other Disabled President: JFK’s Chronic Back Pain and Cover Up"- Beth Linker, PhD
The Other Disabled President: JFK’s Chronic Back Pain and Cover Up
Beth Linker, PhD
Department Chair, History and Sociology of Science
Samuel H. Preston Endowed Term Professor in the social sciences
University of Pennsylvania
Paralyzed in 1921 from the waist down from polio, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt kept his disability and his use of assistive mobility devices out of the public eye. All events were staged, requiring the coordination of the secret service, close confidants, and the press to orchestrate his image as nondisabled. Because of this, author Hugh Gallagher has characterized the FDR presidency as a “splendid deception” of significant proportions.
This paper argues that the same story can be told of John F. Kennedy. Kennedy struggled with back pain since his early adulthood. By the time of his presidential inauguration in January 1961, he had already undergone three back surgeries. During the campaign, one political advisor later confessed that JFK mostly used crutches in private, before and after public events. During his presidency, he took high doses of painkillers and relied on a near constant use of a back brace, all the while denouncing “soft Americans” and their presumed lives of leisure.
Using archival documents from the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, this paper will explore JFK’s own splendid deception. In the end, I argue that contrary to the image of him advancing the cause of disability rights, JFK and his family fostered ableism, largely for their own political gains.
Registration Required; Lunch Provided
Streaming available via Zoom.
Hybrid: 1402 Blockley Hall, 423 Guardian Drive (and virtual via Zoom)
Penn Medical Ethics
Hybrid: 1402 Blockley Hall, 423 Guardian Drive (and virtual via Zoom)
Hybrid-Penn Bioethics Seminar Series (PBS): "Placebos in Psychiatry" - Kevin Kennedy, MD
Learn More
2025-10-28 12:00:00
2025-10-28 13:00:00
America/New_York
Hybrid-Penn Bioethics Seminar Series (PBS): "Placebos in Psychiatry" - Kevin Kennedy, MD
Placebos in Psychiatry
Kevin Kennedy, MD
Psychiatrist, Mental Health Clinic Chrome Team
Corporal Michael J. Crescenz VA Medical Center, Philadelphia
Kevin P. Kennedy, M.D. is interested in evaluating the quality of evidence supporting the pharmacological treatment of depression, with a particular interest in patients with medical and psychiatric comorbidities, the use of psychiatric polypharmacy, and augmentation strategies.
He is interested in identifying discrepancies between clinical trial evidence and real-world treatment in VA. At a conceptual level, he is interested in applying concepts of medical reversal and medical conservatism to psychiatry.
More detail to follow.
Registration required; Lunch provided.
Streaming available via Zoom.
Hybrid: 1402 Blockley Hall, 423 Guardian Drive (and virtual via Zoom)
Penn Medical Ethics
Hybrid: RCH B102AB, Richards Bldg., 3700 Hamilton Walk (and virtual via Zoom)
Hybrid-Research Ethics and Policy Series (REPS): Neuroscience Research Ethics - Anna Wexler, PhD
Learn More
2025-11-11 12:00:00
2025-11-11 13:00:00
America/New_York
Hybrid-Research Ethics and Policy Series (REPS): Neuroscience Research Ethics - Anna Wexler, PhD
Neuroscience Research Ethics
Anna Wexler, PhD
Assistant Professor of Medical Ethics and Health Policy
University of Pennsylvania
Anna Wexler is the principal investigator of the Wexler Lab, where she studies the ethical, legal, and social issues surrounding emerging technology. She is particularly interested in do-it-yourself (DIY) medicine, citizen science, direct-to-consumer (DTC) health products, online patient communities, neuroscience technology, and alternative neurotherapies.
More detail to follow.
Registration Required. Lunch provided.
Streaming available via Zoom.
Hybrid: RCH B102AB, Richards Bldg., 3700 Hamilton Walk (and virtual via Zoom)
Penn Medical Ethics
1104 Blockley Hall (Note: Virtual attendees can join by accessing this link: https://upenn.zoom.us/j/95353951407.)
Health Policy Research Seminar: Lisa Harnack, DrPH, RD, MPH, Professor and Interim Division Head of Epidemiology & Community Health, University of Minnesota
Learn More
2025-11-13 12:00:00
2025-11-13 13:00:00
America/New_York
Health Policy Research Seminar: Lisa Harnack, DrPH, RD, MPH, Professor and Interim Division Head of Epidemiology & Community Health, University of Minnesota
This event is co-sponsored with the The Center for Food and Nutrition Policy.
for Lisa Harnack is a public health nutrition expert whose research strengthens the scientific evidence underpinning nutrition policies, programs, and practices. She led the first experimental trial evaluating whether placing calorie information on restaurant menus influences meal choices and consumption. Findings from this study have been cited in more than 30 domestic and international policy-related documents and reports, including the FDA’s code of regulation for calorie labeling on restaurant menus.
More recently, Dr. Harnack conducted the first experimental trials assessing food purchase restrictions on sugary foods as a strategy to improve family nutrition within the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Her findings continue to inform ongoing policy discussions on potential program changes. She also authored a CDC-commissioned study identifying sources of sodium in the American diet, which revealed that 71% of sodium intake comes from salt and other sodium compounds added during commercial food processing. This research carries regulatory implications, as the FDA has indicated it may reconsider the Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS) status of salt if voluntary sodium reduction efforts prove insufficient.
In addition to her research, Dr. Harnack directs the University of Minnesota Nutrition Coordinating Center (NCC). The NCC developed, maintains, and supports two widely used dietary assessment tools: the Nutrition Data System for Research (NDSR) and the NCC Food and Nutrient Database. NDSR is used in research at over 100 institutions—including most major research universities as well as government agencies such as the NIH and NASA. The NCC Food and Nutrient Database is also licensed to support food frequency questionnaires, such as the NIH Diet History Questionnaire, and consumer diet-tracking applications.
1104 Blockley Hall (Note: Virtual attendees can join by accessing this link: https://upenn.zoom.us/j/95353951407.)
Penn Medical Ethics
Virtual, via Zoom
Virtual-Penn Bioethics Seminar Series (PBS): Public Health Ethics - Maxwell J. Smith, PhD
Learn More
2025-11-25 12:00:00
2025-11-25 13:00:00
America/New_York
Virtual-Penn Bioethics Seminar Series (PBS): Public Health Ethics - Maxwell J. Smith, PhD
Maxwell J. Smith, PhD
Associate Professor
CIHR Applied Public Health Chair in Ethics and Health Emergencies
Western University - Canada
Professor Smith’s programme of research is in the area of public health ethics—a sub-field of bioethics—which seeks to examine the ethical dimensions of public health policy and practice. His research in this domain involves the critical investigation of how ethical considerations, ethical issues, and ethical reasoning are, and ought to be, approached and addressed in public health policy, practice, and research. Within this programme, professor Smith’s research falls into the following areas:
Infectious disease ethics, namely, how to think about and integrate ethics into public health emergency preparedness and response
Health equity and social justice, namely, investigating the ethical dimensions of these ‘core values’ and how they ought to be operationalized in public health, health care, and health policy
In addition to these two areas that capture the principal foci of professor Smith’s programme of research, his research regularly investigates a number of other emerging issues in public health ethics and bioethics, including in the areas of organ donation, termination of pregnancy, health care decision-making, and artificial intelligence.
More detail to follow.
Virtual, via Zoom
Penn Medical Ethics
Hybrid: RCH B102AB, Richards Bldg., 3700 Hamilton Walk (and virtual via Zoom)
Hybrid-Research Ethics and Policy Series (REPS): What Makes Clinical Research Ethical - Christine Grady, MSN, PhD
Learn More
2025-12-09 12:00:00
2025-12-09 13:00:00
America/New_York
Hybrid-Research Ethics and Policy Series (REPS): What Makes Clinical Research Ethical - Christine Grady, MSN, PhD
What Makes Clinical Research Ethical?
Christine Grady, MSN, PhD
Former Chair, Department of Bioethics,
NIH Clinical Center
Dr. Grady has published widely in the biomedical and bioethics literature and authored or edited several books, including The Oxford Textbook of Clinical Research Ethics.
Dr. Christine Grady's contributions are both conceptual and empirical and are primarily in the ethics of clinical research, including informed consent, vulnerability, study design, recruitment, and international research ethics, as well as ethical issues faced by nurses and other health care providers.
More detail to follow.
Registration Required. Lunch provided.
Streaming available via Zoom.
Hybrid: RCH B102AB, Richards Bldg., 3700 Hamilton Walk (and virtual via Zoom)
Penn Medical Ethics
1
2