Mary Catherine Beach Elected Hastings Center Fellow

December 1, 2021

The Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics is pleased to announce that a member of its faculty, Mary Catherine Beach, MD, PhD, has been elected a Fellow 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.

Dr. Beach is a professor of medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and a core faculty member of the Berman Institute. She has been a Greenwall fellow, a health policy fellow in the office of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, and a recipient of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Generalist Physician Faculty Scholar Award. Dr. Beach’s scholarship about respect and relationships in health care encompasses both empirical and conceptual dimensions. Her empirical work focuses primarily on respect and communication between patients and clinicians. For the last several years, most of Dr. Beach’s research has centered on people living with HIV/AIDS and sickle cell disease, and on how respect is conveyed (or not) in patient medical records.

Dr. Beach joins several Berman Institute faculty colleagues as a Hastings Center Fellow. They are:

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