Clarkson Bioethics Collaborates with The Hastings Center to Develop Climate Change, Health, and Ethics Program

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October 24, 2023

Clarkson University's Bioethics program is teaming up with The Hastings Center to offer a new program focused on Climate Bioethics. The program will recruit Caribbean Research Ethics Education Initiative (CREEi) program graduate students to spend a year learning about climate change and health and exploring normative ethics questions often overlooked in related research, policy, and practice.

Through this program, students will integrate bioethics into climate change and health dialogue and research, shedding light on the values that influence research funding, design, reporting, and impact for climate scientists and health professionals.

The program aims to improve critical thinking and writing skills among a cohort of eight Caribbean researchers to enhance their scholarship and contributions to collaborative research. Its goal is also to cultivate a network of climate change and health scholars to forge multidisciplinary collaborations among bioethicist and non-bioethicist researchers and practitioners.

CREEi-Hastings Center Climate Bioethics Program fellows will be empowered to integrate bioethics and climate change and health into their teaching, engage in equal partnerships for international research, collaborate on trans-disciplinary climate change and health research, and contribute to public health interventions. This will ultimately enhance health equity in the Caribbean, a region uniquely vulnerable to climate change due to its geography and socioeconomics.

Outputs will include open access to an online casebook written by trainees, teaching materials, and a public-facing webinar.

For nearly 13 years, Clarkson University's Bioethics Department, part of the Lewis School of Health Sciences, has been a partner with St. George's University, Grenada, and the Autonomous University of Querétaro, Mexico, on the Caribbean Research Ethics Education Initiative (CREEi). CREEi is a National Institutes of Health Fogarty International Center funded program to foster research ethics capacity in low- and middle-income countries in the English- and Spanish-speaking Caribbean.

The Hastings Center is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization created from multiple disciplines, including philosophy, law, political science, and education. The Hastings Center was critical to establishing the field of bioethics in 1969 and has been evolving ever since. Founded by philosopher Daniel Callahan and psychoanalyst Willard Gaylin, The Hastings Center is the oldest independent, nonpartisan, interdisciplinary research institute of its kind in the world.