Research Ethics

Supporting ethical research practices is a core mission of the Berman Institute.

Research ethics spans the range of our work, with projects, teaching, and service efforts overlapping the areas of clinical ethics, public health ethics, and science ethics.

Johns Hopkins is a research intensive university. Providing training and service in research ethics is at the heart of the Berman Institute’s mission, building on more than twenty years of scholarship in this area.

Faculty

Berman Institute faculty members are active in both scholarly and academic roles but also in many other areas such as institutional review boards and operations, as well as many policy making initiatives. We invite you to learn more about our faculty and their contributions.

View Faculty in Research Ethics

Education

Berman Institute faculty provide required research ethics training at the Schools of Medicine, Nursing, and Public Health.  Berman faculty developed an innovative program of research ethics training for Johns Hopkins Medicine and Nursing faculty, staff, and students combining required introductory material with case discussion and seminar options of the learner’s choosing; Berman faculty teach required research ethics courses for PhD and master’s students in the Bloomberg school and provide countless guest lectures across the East Baltimore and Homewood campuses on research ethics.  The Berman Institute has provided research ethics training for African professionals for 15 years through the Fogarty African Bioethics Training Program; training in research ethics also has been provided in multiple countries including China, Pakistan, India, Botswana, Uganda, and Zambia.

Research/Scholarship

Berman faculty have conducted conceptual and empirical scholarship on informed consent through dozens of federally funded projects; work has documented how informed consent works in multiple settings and also created and tested novel interventions; work has occurred both within the U.S. and globally; Ruth Faden also authored a seminal text on informed consent.  Berman faculty have conducted projects on ancillary care commitments, what is owed to participants after studies are completed; incentives in research, participants’ understanding, and IRB quality; more recent work has focused on ethics and learning health care systems; and ethics and animals research. Considerable work has been conducted on the ethics of stem cell research, per above. All of this work, like so much of Berman Institute work, is directly collaborative with the researchers whose projects are being studied.

Service/Policy

Berman Institute faculty as a matter of institutional policy, sit on the IRBs of the Schools of Medicine and Public Health.  In addition, the IRB for the All of Us Research program is chaired by Nancy Kass. Faculty also serve as advisors to the IRBs on matters of institutional policy regarding human research. Berman faculty founded and continues to staff the Research Ethics Consultation service. Berman faculty have been members of, staffed, or testified before President Clinton’s Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, President Clinton’s National Bioethics Advisory Commission; President Bush’s Council on Bioethics, and President Obama’s Commission for the study of Bioethical Issues. Berman faculty have led or served on committees of the National Academy of medicine related to human and to animal research and led work for the National Cancer Institute creating model national guidance on informed consent; Berman faculty have served on multiple Data Safety and Monitoring Boards for federally and privately funded trials including the recent NIH sponsored ebola trials. Berman faculty also lead institutional, statewide, and international policy efforts on ethics and stem cell research, as above.

Resources

The following links connect to ongoing and previously completed work, demonstrating the Berman Institute’s leadership and achievements in advancing understanding of research ethics.

Achieving Ethically Appropriate & Effective Local Context Review by Single IRBs
Identifying the purpose and content of local context review when using a single institutional review board for the ethical review of multisite research
Reexamining the Ethical Permissibility of Dual Role Consent
Developing empirically informed guidance for when physician-investigators may permissibly solicit informed consent for research from patients with whom they have a pre-existing treatment relationship
Institutional Obligations for Pragmatic Clinical Trials
Developing a normative account and practical guidance for embedded pragmatic clinical trials
Data Sharing in Pragmatic Clinical Trials
Identifying the ethical and regulatory issues from requirements to share clinical trials data for pragmatic clinical trials embedded in health systems
New Human Embryo Models Require New Guidelines for Their Ethical Use in Research
Prof. Jeremy Sugarman publishes paper in Cell Stem Cell
How Abortion Restrictions Can Influence Research
Participants and researchers both impacted, according to Prof. Sugarman article in Science
JHU Collaborates with Addis Ababa University to Launch Research Ethics Master’s Program
Berman Institute's Joseph Ali helps create the first bioethics-related Master’s training program in Ethiopia
Join the Berman Institute at ASBH 2021
A guide to everything Berman Institute-related at the 23rd annual meeting of the American Society for Bioethics + Humanities, Oct. 11-16
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