Global Health
My work includes the following issues:
Ethical issues related to conducting clinical trials in resource-poor countries:
- Conceptual issues related to the notion of informed consent, in particular to the understanding and voluntariness components of informed consent.
- Conceptual issues related to the notion of benefit and how benefits or research participation might be understood in resource-poor settings.
Ethical concerns related to disparities in the use of health care resources:
- Evaluation of the ethical grounds that different public policies offer to justify a particular distribution of health care resources
- Evaluation of how science policies contribute to unjust inequalities in the distribution of health care resources
Ethical and epistemological issues related to scientific decision-making when dealing with diseases that are of particular concern to resource-poor countries:
- Evaluation of how the social aims of particular research projects (development of HPV vaccines; development of malaria vaccines and drugs, etc) play important roles in justifying decisions about how research problems are defined in drug development, evidentiary standards used in testing drug success, and clinical trial methodology."
