Johns Hopkins UniversityEst. 1876

America’s First Research University

Research Area: Research Ethics

Leslie Meltzer Henry, JD, PhD

Professor Henry provides expert commentary for federal and local agencies, organizations, and the media. She has served as a bioethics consultant to the Department of Defense and has presented before panels of the Department of Health and Human Services, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the National Institutes of Health Bioethics Advisory Committee. Professor Henry has provided written commentary for the Mid-Atlantic Ethics Committee Network, and she has been quoted in media outlets including the Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, NPR, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Forbes, and the Baltimore Sun.

Professor Henry is a co-investigator on a project focused on addressing the ethical and legal challenges of conducting research with pregnant women during public health emergencies, like the Zika crisis, where there is an urgent need to attend to the health needs of pregnant women and their offspring.  She is also a member of PHASES, a research team aiming to develop ethically and legally acceptable strategies for conducting research about HIV treatment and prevention during pregnancy.

Prior to joining the faculty, Professor Henry completed a post-doctoral fellowship in bioethics and health policy at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and Georgetown Law Center, clerked for the Honorable Judith Rogers of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, was a fellow in the National Institutes of Health’s Office of Human Subjects Research, and was founder and Editor-in-Chief of the Yale Journal of Health Policy, Law, and Ethics.

Mark T. Hughes, MD, MA

In addition to his work in ethics, Dr. Hughes is co-developer and associate editor of the Internet Learning Center, an Internet-based curriculum utilized by medical residency programs across the nation. From 2005 to 2009, he was a facilitator in the course Curriculum Development in the Longitudinal Johns Hopkins Bayview Faculty Development Program, and he is co-editor of the book “Curriculum Development for Medical Education,” now in its third edition. Dr. Hughes previously served as a core faculty member in the Florence R. Sabin College in the School of Medicine. He has been an associate editor for the Journal of General Internal Medicine and was coordinator of the End-of-Life Interest Group for the Society of General Internal Medicine..

Alan Regenberg, MBE

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; and the eSchool+ Initiative. 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)

Yoram Unguru, MD, MS, MA

Full Bio

Dr. Unguru is a pediatric hematologist/oncologist with joint faculty appointments at The Herman and Walter Samuelson Children’s Hospital at Sinai and The John Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics.  He is also Associate Professor in the School of Medicine, Johns Hopkins University.  His B.A. in historical studies and M.A. with a concentration in the history of medicine and medical ethics were granted at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Dr. Unguru also received a Master of Science (valedictorian) in interdisciplinary studies in biological and physical science at Touro College / Barry Z. Levine School of Health Sciences. He earned his M.D. (valedictorian) at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology / Bruce Rappaport Faculty of Medicine. He completed his pediatric residency at the Children’s Hospital at Sinai and his pediatric hematology/oncology fellowship at Children’s National Medical Center in Washington DC.  Dr. Unguru was a postdoctoral Greenwall Fellow in Bioethics and Public Policy at Johns Hopkins University.  Dr. Unguru is board certified both in pediatrics and in pediatric hematology/oncology.

Dr. Unguru’s research interests include clinical and research ethics.  His scholarship and publications have focused on the role of children and providers in facilitating shared decision-making, end-of-life decision-making, allocation of scarce lifesaving medications, and ethics education.   Dr. Unguru has served as a consultant to the American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Pediatric Research, the American Medical Association Council on Ethical and Judicial Affairs, the Food Drug and Administration, and the US Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.  He is on the Editorial Board of Pediatric Ethicscope and serves as a peer reviewer for leading academic medical journals.  Dr. Unguru is Chair of the Children’s Oncology Group, Bioethics Steering Committee and past member of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, Ethics Committee.

Dr. Unguru is the Chairman of the Ethics Committee at Sinai Hospital of Baltimore where he implemented and directs a clinical ethics curriculum for the pediatric house staff at The Herman and Walter Samuelson Children’s Hospital at Sinai.  He is past recipient of “Teacher of the Year” as chosen by the pediatric house staff at The Herman and Walter Samuelson Children’s Hospital.

Dr. Unguru leads a multidisciplinary, transnational working group examining the ethical and policy implications of chemotherapy shortages in childhood cancer and is a member of the Maryland health system consortium tasked with operationalizing scarce resource allocation processes for public health catastrophes, including the COVID-19 pandemic.

Select Media Appearances

Nancy E. Kass, ScD

Dr. Kass is coeditor (with Ruth Faden) of HIV, AIDS and Childbearing: Public Policy, Private Lives (Oxford University Press, 1996).

She has served as consultant to the President’s Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, to the National Bioethics Advisory Commission, and to the National Academy of Sciences. Dr. Kass currently serves as the Chair of the NIH Precision Medicine Initiative Central IRB; she previously co-chaired the National Cancer Institute (NCI) Committee to develop Recommendations for Informed Consent Documents for Cancer Clinical Trials and served on the NCI’s central IRB. Current research projects examine improving informed consent in human research, ethical guidance development for Ebola and other infectious outbreaks, and ethics and learning health care. Dr. Kass teaches the Bloomberg School of Public Health’s course on U.S. and International Research Ethics and Integrity, she served as the director of the School’s PhD program in bioethics and health policy from its inception until 2016, and she has directed the Johns Hopkins Fogarty African Bioethics Training Program since its inception in 2000. Dr. Kass is an elected member of the Institute of Medicine (now National Academy of Medicine) and an elected Fellow of the Hastings Center.

Jeremy Sugarman, MD, MPH, MA

He was the founding director of the Trent Center for Bioethics, Humanities and History of Medicine at Duke University where he was also a professor of medicine and philosophy. He was appointed as an Academic Icon at the University of Malaya and is a faculty affiliate of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University.

Dr. Sugarman was the longstanding chair of the Ethics Working Group of the HIV Prevention Trials Network. He is currently a member of the Scientific and Research Advisory Board for the Canadian Blood Service and the Ethics and Public Policy Committees of the International Society for Stem Cell Research. He co-leads the Ethics and Regulatory Core of the NIH Health Care Systems Research Collaboratory and is co-chair of the Johns Hopkins’ Institutional Stem Cell Research Oversight Committee.

Dr. Sugarman has been elected as a member of the American Society of Clinical Investigation, Association of American Physicians, and the National Academy of Medicine (formerly the Institute of Medicine). He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American College of Physicians and the Hastings Center. He also received a Doctor of Science, honoris causa, from New York Medical College.

Ruth R. Faden, PhD, MPH

Ruth R. Faden, PhD, MPH, is the founder of the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics. She was the Berman Institute’s Director from 1995 until 2016, and the inaugural Andreas C. Dracopoulos Director (2014-­2016). Dr. Faden was the inaugural Philip Franklin Wagley Professor of Biomedical Ethics rom 1995-2026. In the twenty-plus years in which Dr. Faden led the Berman Institute, she transformed what was an informal interest group of faculty across Johns Hopkins into a one of the world’s premier bioethics programs with over 35 faculty, 30 staff and over 100 alumni. Under her direction, the Berman Institute became a university­wide unit of Johns Hopkins with its own building, reporting to the Provost. Dr. Faden also secured a significant endowment for the Berman Institute, including six endowed professorships and an endowed directorship.

Dr. Faden is a leading scholar in the field of bioethics. She is the author and editor of numerous books and many articles on biomedical ethics and public policy, including most significantly Social Justice: The Moral Foundations of Public Health and Health Policy (with Madison Powers), A History and Theory of Informed Consent (with Tom L. Beauchamp), Structural Injustice: Power, Advantage, and Human Rights (with Madison Powers; Oxford University Press).

Dr. Faden co-led the PREVENT  (Pregnancy Research Ethics for Vaccines, Epidemics, and New Technologies 2016-2018) and COMIT (COVID-19 Maternal Immunization Tracker (2019-2021) projects. She is a co-investigator on”Enabling Ethical Analysis and Public Justification in State-Level Pandemic Responses in the United States,” project; Commissioner on the Lancet Commission, Strengthening the Usefulness of Epidemiological Modeling, 2023-Present; a member of the James Beard Foundation Ethics Committee, October 2021 – Present; and a member of the COVID-19 Ethics & Governance Working Group, World Health Organization, February 2021 – Present.

Dr. Faden is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine and a Fellow of the Hastings Center and the American Psychological Association. She has served on numerous national advisory committees and commissions, including President William Clinton’s Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, which she chaired.

In 2011, Dr. Faden was the recipient of Lifetime Achievement Awards from the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities (ASBH) and Public Responsibility in Medicine and Research (PRIMR). In 2019 she was the recipient of the Bioethics Founders Award from the Hastings Center, for Lifetime Achievement and in 2025 she was awarded the Greenwall Foundation’s Bernard Lo, MD Mentoring Award in Bioethics.