Berman Institute Faculty Receive NIH Grant to Help Establish Bioethics Training Program

Berman Institute faculty have received a grant from the National Institutes of Health Fogarty International Center called the Fogarty African Bioethics Post-Doctoral Fellowship Program (FAB-PDF), a 5-year, $1.2 million grant that provides advanced bioethics training for scholars from sub-Saharan Africa. FAB-PDF will provide an 18-month postdoctoral training program to select scholars who hold a bioethics-related PhD. Ten postdocs will be selected over the course of the grant.

Joseph Ali, the Institute’s associate director for global programs and associate professor in the Department of International Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health will co-lead the project along with Nancy Kass, deputy director for public health at the Berman Institute and professor of Health Policy and Management at the Bloomberg School and Nelson Sewankambo, professor of medicine at Makerere University College of Health Sciences in Uganda. The grant broadly focuses on global bioethics, however, scholars can focus on specific areas of global bioethics such as global infectious disease ethics and advanced international research ethics.

FAB-PDF is a renewal from a previous grant launched in 2017 by the Fogarty International Center that provided bioethics postdoctoral training. The renewal of the grant includes new components such as training opportunities at Johns Hopkins University, Makerere University in Uganda, the University of Oxford in the UK, and each fellow’s home institution. The training opportunities will include coursework, a mentored global health ethics leadership project, and bioethics professional networks.

FAB-PDF has the following aims:

• To provide advanced scholarly research training and mentorship to a select group of PhD-level African bioethics scholars.
• To foster leadership development in global bioethics relevant to fellows’ sustained professional visibility and success.
• To generate individual and group professional bioethics networking opportunities across international bioethics organizations.

Other faculty on the project include Gail Geller, director of education initiatives at the Berman Institute and professor in the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Maria Merritt, associate professor at the Berman Institute and in the Department of International Health at the Bloomberg School, and Andrea Ruff, MD, associate professor in the Department of International Health at the Bloomberg School.