Learn to Reason Through Novel Bioethics Problems and Develop Actionable Solutions

The Bioethics and Science Policy concentration immerses students in the methodology bioethicists use to reason through hard questions and applies those methods to the dilemmas being created by biomedical innovation. We consider how these developments may affect research subjects in clinical trials, patients in healthcare settings, and society as a whole. We understand bioethics broadly, considering not only the ethics of the clinical encounter, but the ethics of the science that produces new possibilities for intervening in human life, health, and biology itself.  

We treat ethical frameworks as objects of experimentation and evaluation, encouraging students to try out different approaches and find the value in each. From bench to bedside to regulation, we ask where our guiding principles hold up, where they break down, and what it takes to make them workable in practice. Students leave this concentration able to reason carefully about genuinely novel problems, not just apply familiar answers to old ones. 

Develop Skills That Matter 

Our curriculum pairs the foundational methods of bioethics with focused study of clinical ethics, empirical research design, and health and science policy. You’ll learn to work through difficult cases the way practicing bioethicists do, while building the practical toolkit needed for consultation, research, and policy roles. 

Throughout the program, you will develop the ability to: 

• Reason through concrete ethical dilemmas using the field’s foundational methodologies, from principlism to casuistry to narrative and feminist bioethics. 
• Examine the ethical stakes of advances in the biological sciences, including fetal therapy and maternal-fetal intervention, gene therapy and genetic modification, synthetic biology, xenotransplantation, and technologies that extend or sustain human life. 
• Describe clinical ethics consultation and understand the day-to-day workings of hospital and research ethics committees. 
• Design and appraise empirical bioethics research capable of informing real institutional and policy decisions. 
• Interpret the regulatory and legal frameworks governing human subjects research, reproductive medicine, and novel biotechnologies. 
• Translate complex ethical questions for patients, families, scientists, clinicians, and policymakers alike. 
• Contribute substantively to institutional, professional, and national policy as the biological sciences advance. 
• Cultivate a depth of subject-matter expertise that sets graduates apart within teams of clinicians, scientists, and attorneys. 

These skills prepare graduates to take on the ethical questions that will only grow more central as biology’s frontiers expand. 

Help Society Keep Pace with the Biological Sciences 

The pace of discovery in medicine and the biological sciences often outstrips our ethical consideration of how new capabilities should be used. Closing that gap requires people who understand both the underlying ethics and policy frameworks and the potential stakes of their application. 

As a graduate of this program, you’ll be equipped to support clinical ethics consultation, contribute to research on emerging biotechnologies, and inform policy touching everything from in-utero surgical intervention to gene editing to synthetic organisms. You will help scientists, clinicians, and policymakers work through decisions with consequences for patients, research subjects, and the public. 

Whether you’re advising a hospital ethics committee, contributing to research on reproductive or genetic technologies, or shaping science policy at an agency or advocacy organization, this work sits at the center of how society governs its own biological future. 

Differentiate Yourself

This concentration is an excellent complement to a clinical degree, a JD, or a PhD: focused training in bioethics methodology and its application to live scientific and clinical questions allows you to specialize in the aspects of your career that are the most intriguing. Graduates bring an ethical fluency to their work that few others can offer.

If you’re drawn to the questions at the edge of what biology and medicine can do, and want to help ensure our answers are as careful as our science, we invite you to apply. Together, we can help the pace of ethical reasoning keep up with the pace of discovery.

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