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Welcome to the website of the newly established University of California, Irvine Center for Health Ethics. Based in UCI’s Program in Public Health, the Center for Health Ethics benefits from the insights, experiences, and expertise of its more than forty founding faculty members. Members of the Center represent all Schools within UCI’s College of Health Sciences. Other founding members have their primary academic homes within departments in the School of Humanities, School of Social Ecology, and School of Social Sciences.
The Center’s mandate is to bring an informed and critical perspective to ethical dimensions of health, illness, and human flourishing. The Center strives to promote thoughtful moral reflection and careful analysis of the role values play — or should play — in variety of health practices, policies, and institutions. The Center’s scope extends from addressing particular ethical issues situated in specific professional contexts and organizational settings to investigating and analyzing “upstream” topics falling within such areas of study as public health ethics, population health ethics, and global health ethics.
Inclusive of different approaches to scholarship and multidisciplinary in orientation, the Center welcomes and supports contributions from a range of academic disciplines, professions, theoretical frameworks, and methodologies.
The Center has begun hosting presentations by visiting speakers and will expand its activities in the months ahead. The Center for Health Ethics has a particular interest in supporting the development of research networks and clusters addressing various topics in health ethics. The Center will also help advance UCI’s educational mission by establishing new educational initiatives in health ethics, contributing to institutional and community service, and promoting outreach to members of local communities.
Dean Bernadette Boden-Albala and the Program in Public Health provided crucial administrative, institutional, and financial support for the establishment of the Center for Health Ethics. The Sue and Bill Gross Stem Cell Research Center and its Director, Professor Aileen Anderson, have also supported the development of the Center for Health Ethics. The creation of a new health ethics center at UCI involved important contributions from many faculty members, with Professor Emeritus Sidney Golub playing an important role in leading efforts to lay the groundwork for the establishment of a health ethics center at UCI. I want to thank these three individuals in particular for their support. I also want to express appreciation to the Center’s founding faculty members for their vital contribution to making our new Center a reality.
Leigh Turner, PhD
Founding Director, UCI Center for Health Ethics
Professor, Department of Health, Society, & Behavior
Program in Public Health