About Me
I am the Wallace & Mona Wu Chair in Bioethics and Professor of Internal Medicine at Wake Forest University School of Medicine, Director of Bioethics and Chair of the Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center Clinical Ethics Committee, and Associate Director for Research at the Center for Bioethics, Health & Society at Wake Forest University, Reynolda Campus. I completed my doctoral training in philosophy and ethics at Rice University and clinical ethics training at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas.
Before joining Wake Forest, from 2014 to 2022 I held a professorship and led a research program in global health bioethics at the Ethox Centre in Population Health at the University of Oxford. Prior to moving to the United Kingdom, I held faculty appointments at UAB, University of Washington, and OHSU. I have collaborated internationally with numerous partners in global health and maternal-child health, including serving on the COVID-19 research ethics committee for the World Health Organization.
I have written and conducted empirical ethics research on topics in international research ethics, equity in care for vulnerable and marginalized populations in maternal-child health, and ethics in learning health systems. My research has been supported by NIH, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, The Greenwall Foundation, and Wellcome Trust. My current research explores the idea of “research as activism”, including a Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator Award, “Equity & Difference”, which explores how novel study designs, better clinical translation, and science communication can help shift gender equity norms in health care.