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Password: Lavery

The dominant paradigm of research ethics around the world is tightly focused on the protection of individual research participants through adherence to pre-specified procedures, such as informed consent. This emphasis on obligations to protect individual research participants has marginalized other dimensions of the global research enterprise that have clear ethical significance. In this presentation Lavery will outline what he sees as some of the defining features of the dominant research ethics paradigm and argue that at least two major ethical considerations are not adequately acknowledged or addressed in this paradigm: obligations to stakeholders beyond individual research participants; and the fairness of the partnerships through which the majority of global health research is funded and conducted. Lavery will discuss the Research Fairness Initiative (RFI) by the Council for Health Research for Development (COHRED) as an initiative that can fill a critical gap in research ethics and expand the current scope of what ethical concerns should count as legitimate considerations in global health research.  And he will describe some of the current applications of the RFI, including a current project which aims to demonstrate how considerations of fairness in research partnerships can be viewed as a constitutive element of what it means to claim that a global health program or campaign has been “effective.”

Jim Lavery is the inaugural Conrad N. Hilton Chair in Global Health Ethics, Professor in the Hubert Department of Global Health in the Rollins School of Public Health, and Faculty of the Center for Ethics, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia. Prior to joining the Emory faculty, he was a Research Scientist and Managing Director of the Centre for Ethical, Social & Cultural Risk at the Li Ka Shing Knowledge Institute of St. Michael’s Hospital, and an Associate Professor in the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, Institute of Medical Science, and Joint Centre for Bioethics at the University of Toronto.

Jim received M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from the Institute of Medical Science and Centre for Bioethics at the University of Toronto and held a post-doctoral fellowship in applied ethics and health policy at the Queen’s University Health Policy Research Unit, funded jointly by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and the Canadian Foundation for Health Services Research. He then spent 3 years at the Fogarty International Center, and Warren G. Magnuson Clinical Center Department of Clinical Bioethics, at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, where he worked on U.S. federal government policy on the regulation of federally-funded research outside the United States.

Jim was the principal investigator of the Ethical, Social and Cultural (ESC) Program for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Global Health and Global Development programs from 2005-2015. He is a Fellow of the Hastings Center and the 2017 recipient of the Global Forum for Bioethics in Research Award for Contributions to Progress in International Research. He is a member of the Board of Directors of the Council for Health Research for Development (COHRED) USA, Chair of the Scientific and Technical Advisory Committee of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Health Campaign Effectiveness Coalition at the Task Force for Global Health in Atlanta, and a member of the Bioethics Advisory Panel of Pfizer, Inc.