Project Team

• Associate Director for Global Programs
  Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics
• Assistant Professor, Department of International Health
  Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health

Joseph Ali’s scholarly work engages a range of ethics and regulatory challenges in domestic and international bioethics. Some of his recent and ongoing research activities have included projects that employ conceptual, qualitative and quantitative methods to evaluate the impact of international bioethics capacity development programs; to create and empirically test enhanced approaches for informed consent; to support ethics and regulatory oversight and guideline development for health services/systems research; and to study the emerging ethical, legal and societal implications of observational and interventional global mobile and digital health. He previously served as Co-Lead of the Ethics & Regulatory Task-Force for the national Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Network (PCORnet) and currently serves as Co-Chair of the Ethics and Regulatory Work Group for the NIH/VA/DOD Pain Management Collaboratory Coordinating Center. He manages the NIH-funded Johns Hopkins-Fogarty African Bioethics Training Program, which, for the past 18 years, has provided training and supported collaborative institutional partnerships to advance research ethics capacity across 14 countries in sub-Saharan Africa. He is also Associate Director of a Fogarty-NIH program to establish a research ethics Master’s program at the University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. He has taught undergraduate and graduate courses in research ethics and bioethics & law at Johns Hopkins and serves on the editorial board of the journal Accountability in Research.

Brooke Jarrett is a doctoral candidate in the infectious disease program in the Department of Epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Her research explores the intersection of technology, infectious disease, mental health, and the LGBT community. While earning her MSPH in international health from Johns Hopkins University, she was the senior researcher for three HIV/TB studies across 14 clinics and 4,000 participants in South Africa. Brooke also has extensive field experience in Peru, Ecuador, and India. Her past work includes providing technical consultations to the UNICEF immunization unit, training volunteers in geo-collaborative technologies for emergency response at the American Red Cross, managing call center operations at McMaster-Carr Supply Company, and co-founding Project Alloy, a nonprofit for historically underrepresented technologists. Brooke earned a BS in environmental engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an MS in environmental engineering from Northwestern University, and a certificate in emergency management from the University of Illinois in Chicago.

Lauren Arora Hutchinson is an audio storyteller, BBC journalist and academic. She founded the immersive audio studio Sunday Blue as a way to further explore the intersection between sound, story and interactivity and look at how intimate experiences can be shared. Lauren has a Leverhulme Trust PhD in the History of Science with a focus on Oral History and was a Wellcome Trust Imperial Media Fellow. She taught on the Masters for Global Public Health at The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine for six years and regularly guest lectures in New York. She is also an Artist in Residence at the Made in New York Media Centre in Brooklyn where she runs workshops in immersive audio.

Alan Regenberg, MBe, is an associate faculty member and the director of outreach and research support at the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics. His primary research interests include: emerging biotechnologies, public engagement, and the allocation of scarce resources. In addition to his own research portfolio, he and his team provide wide-ranging support to Berman Institute researchers. They are also responsible for social media dissemination and active public engagement around the Institute’s work. This includes rapid-response research and the curation of the institute’s social media-based, public-engagement efforts, such as: The Berman Institute Bioethics Bulletin (See his blog posts), Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Weekly Bioethics Email Digests.

Alan is also engaged in a broad range of research projects and programs, including the Berman Institute’s science programs: the Stem Cell Policy and Ethics (SCOPE) Program; the Program in Ethics and Brain Sciences (PEBS-Neuroethics); and the Hinxton Group, an international consortium on stem cells, ethics and law. Recent research has focused on using deliberative democracy tools to engage with communities about their values for allocating scarce medical resources like ventilators in disasters like pandemics. Additional recent work has focused on ethical challenges related to gene editing, stem cell research, social media, public engagement, vaccines, and neuroethics. (Publications)

At Johns Hopkins University, Alan is a member of an Institutional Review Board (IRB-6), and the Institutional Stem Cell Research Oversight Committee (ISCRO). He also serves as the coordinator for the Research Ethics Consultation Service (RECS).

Smisha Agarwal’s research is aimed at improving maternal and newborn health in low-income settings through strengthening community health systems and leveraging innovative technological solutions. Over the last decade, she has developed methods for evaluating programs that employ digital tools such as mobile phones for health service delivery. She has also led a series of systematic Cochrane reviews that have been leveraged by the WHO to develop global guidelines on the use of digital tools to strengthen health services. She continues to work with bilateral and multilateral agencies to support development and implementation of routine health information systems.

Specifically, her research is focused on- 1. The effectiveness of the use of digital devices by community health workers as decision-aids to improve delivery of primary health care services, especially for mothers and infants; 2. Using predictive analytics and machine learning algorithms based on routine monitoring data to enhance our understanding of quality of care, create safety nets to care for high-risk populations and improve effectiveness of reproductive health services; 3.Use of social media websites and data to understand health patterns and behaviors.

Currently, she is working in collaboration with the Population Council, and colleagues at Pathfinder International (Uganda) and Zanmi Lasante (Haiti) to conduct a multi-country study using discrete choice experiments to understand incentive preferences of community health workers in Kenya, Bangladesh, Uganda and Haiti.

Yulia Frumer is the Bo Jung and Soon Young Kim Assistant Professor of East Asian Science and Technology in the Department of History of Science and Technology at the Johns Hopkins University.

She studies the development of science and technology in Japan. She is currently researching the development of Japanese humanoid robotics, focusing on how ideas of humanity (or human-ness) affect technological design. She argues that it is essential to consider factors such as roboticists’ non-engineering training, their engagement with of science fiction and animation, their views on Buddhism and Western philosophy, and their perceived mission as educators, among the forces that shape technological design.

A unifying theme that runs acrossher research is an interest in the relationship between technologies and the particular meanings ascribed to so-called abstract concepts. Her earlier project explored the relationship between the development of early modern Japanese timekeeping technologies and the evolution of conceptions of “time.” Her current project pursues a similar line of inquiry, asking how varying understandings of “humanity” shaped the development of Japanese humanoid robotic technologies. Identifying the cultural factors that shaped roboticists’ hypothetical answers to the question ‘what does it mean to be “human”,’ she explores how cultural assumptions about humanity have shaped Japanese research into human-humanoid interactions.

• Associate Faculty
  Berman Institute of Bioethics
• William H. Welch Professor and Chair
  Department of the History of Medicine
• Director
  Center for Medical Humanities and Social Medicine, The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine

Dr. Jeremy Greene is broadly interested in the history of disease, and his research explores the ways in which medical technologies come to influence our understandings of what it means to be sick or healthy, normal or abnormal. His broader research interests focus on the history of disease, medical technology, the history of global health, and the relationship between medicine and the marketplace. Dr. Greene received an MD and PhD in the history of science from Harvard in 2005, completed a residency in Internal Medicine at the Brigham & Women’s Hospital in 2008, and is board certified in Internal Medicine and a member of the American College of Physicians. In addition to his appointment at the Institute for the History of Medicine, he practices internal medicine at the East Baltimore Medical Center, a community health center affiliated with Johns Hopkins.

Alain Labrique is an infectious disease epidemiologist, community trialist and a globally recognized leader in the application of information and communication technologies (ICTs) to strengthen health systems in resource-limited settings. His research focuses on leveraging mobile and digital technologies to solve public health problems – improving data collection, promoting healthy behaviors, optimizing quality / timeliness of services — but more importantly, pushing the boundaries of what is possible in Digital Health, redefining public health of the future.

Currently serving on the faculty of the Global Disease Epidemiology and Control Program of the Department of International Health, Labrique holds joint appointments in Epidemiology, Community-Public Health (Nursing), Health Sciences Informatics (Medicine), Bioengineering Innovation and Design (Engineering). Labrique has a Master’s in Molecular Biology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a Master’s in Epidemiology and a PhD in Infectious Disease Epidemiology from Johns Hopkins University. He completed his field work as a research fellow at the International Centre for Diarrheal Disease Research in Bangladesh.

One of the most highly cited researchers in the emerging field of mHealth / Digital Health, Labrique received a “Top 11 in 2011” innovator award by the Rockefeller and UN Foundations for his work, and since 2014, has led several global mHealth / Digital Health technical advisory and guideline bodies – including serving as the current chair of the World Health Organization’s Digital Health Guidelines Development Group. In 2018, he received the Excellence in International Public Health Practice award from the Bloomberg School of Public Health and a Distinguished Alumnus Award from the Johns Hopkins University. Today, over 150 Health projects across every division of Hopkins are linked through the JHU Global mHealth Initiative (jhumhealth.org), which Alain founded in 2012.

Dr. Labrique leads one of JHU’s largest field research sites in Bangladesh, heading a team of 850+ field staff to study ways to reduce infant and maternal mortality in Bangladesh. He has nearly 200 peer-reviewed publications and has given over 85 public lectures and invited keynotes on the topic of Digital Health. Labrique is the inventor of a number of appropriate technologies (3 patents pending), including the Portable Field Dark Adaptometer – a novel device currently being validated as a non-invasive method for vitamin A assessment.

Travis N. Rieder, PhD, is the Assistant Director for Education Initiatives, Director of the Master of Bioethics degree program and Research Scholar at the Berman Institute of Bioethics. He is also a Faculty Affiliate at the Center for Public Health Advocacy within the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health.

Travis’ work tends to fall into one of two, quite distinct research programs. The first concerns ethics and policy questions about sustainability and planetary limits. Much of this research has been on issues in climate change ethics and procreative ethics with a particular focus on the intersection of the two – that is, on the question of responsible procreation in the era of climate change.  His publications have appeared in several journals on this topic, as well as in a short book with Springer, entitled Toward a Small Family Ethic (2016). He also works on food ethics related to climate change and sustainability, and is currently a member of the Global Food Ethics and Policy team, focusing on ethical issues concerning high-emissions food, in particular animal-sourced foods.

The second, and much newer, research program concerns ethical and policy issues surrounding America’s opioid epidemic. In this area, Travis has published an essay in Health Affairs concerning physician responsibility for safely weaning patients off prescription opioids, and co-authored a National Academy of Medicine Perspective Paper on Physician Responsibility in combating the opioid crisis.

In addition to his more scholarly writing, Travis is firmly committed to doing bioethics with the public, and to that end writes and interviews regularly for the popular media; his work has appeared in very many high-impact publications, including The Guardian, Washington Post, NPR’s All Things Considered, New Republic, and IFLScience. He writes regularly for The Conversation and blogs occasionally at The Huffington Post and the Berman Institute Bioethics Bulletin.

Shady Grove Oliver is a freelance journalist and writer who has long been fascinated by the intersection of science, society, and storytelling. From 2015-2020 she was the sole reporter at the only local newspaper in the U.S. Arctic. Before that, she was a public radio news director and reporter in New York, California, and Alaska and spent time as a photojournalist in rural south India. She has lived and worked in communities on the front lines of climate change and reported on everything from permafrost degradation and village relocation along the Arctic coast to the potential to use Mars tech for growing food in cold climates. Recently, she was part of the investigative reporting team from the Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica which was awarded the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for coverage of rural justice and sexual assault in Alaska. She holds an M.Sc. in Narrative Medicine from Columbia University and a B.A. in languages and linguistics from the University of California, Riverside.

Get in touch with Shady Grove via email at [email protected] or on Twitter @ShadyGroveO.

Mr. Senior is a producer and broadcast journalist and former media executive. He has produced content for several American TV outlets like National Geographic, CBS News, Discovery ID and NY1 Noticias. But Mr. Senior has dedicated most of his work life to audio content, both in music and spoken word narratives. His 15 years in this field lead him to be executive manager for talk radio stations at Caracol Radio in Colombia, as well as content creator for various news radio networks across the world, including Mexico’s W Radio, ADN Chile and Spain’s Cadena SER. Mr. Senior has a Bachelor’s degree in Media and Journalism from the Universidad de la Sabana in Bogotá and a M.A. in International Affairs from The New School University in New York.