Currently, I am the Senior Clinical Ethics Fellow at the UCLA Health Ethics Center, where I provide supervised clinical ethics consultation, on call coverage, and education throughout the UCLA Health system, as well as assist in developing policies, serve as a member of three ethics committees and participate in research projects and individual scholarship.
As of July 2023, I will be joining the Baylor College of Medicine‘s Center for Medical Ethics and Health Policy as an Assistant Professor, where I will continue my research, teaching and clinical ethics consultation work at Houston Methodist Hospital.
Prior to my work at UCLA, I completed my Ph.D. in Philosophy at the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center, focusing on ethics, applied ethics (especially bioethics), and moral psychology. My dissertation examined the theoretical underpinnings of informed consent, and argued that it serves to protect what I termed the “bodily self-sovereignty” of patients. I also considered two ‘case studies’ that illustrate the moral importance of securing informed consent – consent in psychiatrically ill populations, and consent to research that involves modification of the genetic germline.
In addition to my scholarly endeavors, I taught widely throughout New York City for the better part of a decade (see Teaching page for more information). I also served as an Ethics Fellow at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (ISMMS) and an Associate Fellow at the GE2P2 Global Foundation.
Before coming to CUNY, I pursued graduate studies in Bioethics at NYU‘s Center for Bioethics and attended Columbia University as a John Jay Scholar, majoring in Philosophy and concentrating in Political Science. I graduated magna cum laude with departmental honors in Philosophy in 2009.
Aside from here, you can find me (and my work) on the internet at Academia.edu, PhilPeople, ResearchGate, Google Scholar, and LinkedIn.
Photo credit: Gary Ostertag
Joanna Smolenski, Ph.D. 