Joe Ali, Anne Barnhill, Anna Mastroianni, and Travis Rieder Elected Hastings Center Fellows

The Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics is pleased to announce that three members of its faculty, Joe Ali, Anne Barnhill, Anna Mastroianni, and Travis Rieder have been elected as Fellows by The Hastings Center.

Hastings Center Fellows are a group of more than 200 individuals of outstanding accomplishment whose work has informed scholarship and public understanding of complex ethical issues in health, health care, science, and technology. Their common distinguishing feature is uncommon insight and impact in areas of critical concern to the Center–how best to understand and manage the inevitable values questions, moral uncertainties, and societal effects that arise as a consequence of advances in the life sciences, the need to improve health and health care for people of all ages, and mitigation of human impact on the natural world.

Joseph Ali, JD, is associate director for global programs and core faculty at the Berman Institute. Ali’s research and teaching engage a range of challenges in domestic and global health ethics. This includes empirical and normative work in U.S. and international research ethics, and projects that address the implications of emerging global mobile and digital technologies as applied in the context of health research, public health programs, and disease surveillance. He is particularly interested in how values are expressed, represented, prioritized, preserved, and influenced in the context of digital technologies. Ali is committed to collaboratively supporting the capacity of scholars from resource-constrained countries and settings to lead bioethics research, teaching, and practice on issues of local importance. He has been involved in establishing and operating NIH Fogarty-funded nondegree, master’s, doctoral and post-doctoral programs in bioethics at Johns Hopkins and with partners in Uganda, Ethiopia, Zambia, Botswana, and Malaysia. He also co-leads the Wellcome-funded Oxford University-Johns Hopkins University Global Infectious Disease Ethics Collaborative, which supports research and training to address emerging issues involving ethics and infectious disease. He is associate editor for the Journal of Empirical Research on Human Research Ethics.

Anne Barnhill, PhD, is an associate research professor at the Berman Institute. She is a philosopher and bioethicist whose research centers on the ethics of food and agriculture, and the ethics of public health. Her food ethics research explores the ethics of healthy eating policy, the ethical dimensions of efforts to promote plant-based diets, ethnically and racially targeted food marketing, and human rights violations within food systems. Her most recent book, co-authored with Matteo Bonotti is Healthy Eating Policy and Political Philosophy: A Public Reason Approach, explores the ethics and legitimacy of healthy eating policy in high-income countries. During the Covid-19 pandemic, she and colleagues at Johns Hopkins explored the ethical challenges of the pandemic, including the ethics and legitimacy of lockdown and reopening, the ethics of digital contact tracing, and ethical issues related to vaccination.

Anna C. Mastroianni, JD, MPH, is a research professor in bioethics and law and core faculty at the Berman Institute. Her scholarly work examines complex issues at the intersection of law, bioethics, public health, and health policy, with special emphasis on the legal and ethical challenges arising in research in pregnancy, the use of genetic technologies in public health, reproductive rights, and family building through assisted reproductive technologies. She is Charles I. Stone Emeritus Professor of Law at the University of Washington School of Law and, until stepping down in 2022, served as associate director of the university’s Institute for Public Health Genetics and held additional faculty appointments in the School of Public Health and School of Medicine. Before joining the full-time faculty at the University of Washington, she was a practicing attorney and served in several legal and governmental policy positions in Washington, D.C. including as staff director of the White House Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments and study director for the National Academy of Medicine. She is an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, recognized for her contributions to health policy, law, and bioethics. She serves on consensus, advisory, and oversight committees, both nationally and internationally.

Travis N. Rieder, PhD, is associate research professor at the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics, where he directs the Master of Bioethics degree program. He also has secondary appointments in the departments of philosophy and of health policy & management, as well as in the Center for Public Health Advocacy. Most of his scholarship, speaking, and writing for the public falls into one of two research programs. The first one involves the ethical and policy issues raised by pain, pain medicine, drugs, addiction, and North America’s drug overdose crisis. On this subject, he has published in the bioethics, medical, and public health literature, as well as for the popular press, including a TED Talk and his first book, In Pain. The second research program involves the overarching theme of “catastrophe.” In particular, Rieder is concerned with how to engage in ethical reasoning about our own, individual lives in a time dominated by massive, structural threats that are too big and too complex for any one of us to meaningfully address on our own. This has led to publications on climate change, pandemics, food ethics, and overpopulation—and is the subject of his second book, Catastrophe Ethics (Dutton, March 2024). www.travisrieder.com

Ali, Barnhill, Mastroianni, and Rieder join nine of their Berman Institute faculty colleagues as Hastings Center Fellows. They are:

• Mary Catherine Beach
• Joseph Carrese
• Ruth Faden
• Gail Geller
• Jeffrey Kahn
• Nancy Kass
• Debra Mathews
• Maria Merritt
• Cynda Hylton Rushton