Three Penn Medicine Faculty Members Named Hastings Center Fellows

PHILADELPHIA— Three faculty from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania have been named 2023 Hastings Center Fellows. Emily Largent, PhD, RN, an assistant professor of Medical Ethics and Health Policy, Peter Reese, MD, PhD, a professor of Medicine in the Division of Renal Electrolyte and Hypertension, and Dominic Sisti, PhD, an associate professor of Medical Ethics and Health Policy, are among 12 new Fellows joining an elected group of over 200. The fellows are recognized for their work towards informing scholarship and public understanding of complex ethical issues in health, health care, life sciences research, and the environment. 

In addition to her position with Penn’s Medical Ethics and Health Policy, Largent holds a secondary appointment at University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School. Largent’s research examines ethical and regulatory issues arising in human subjects research, with a particular focus on Alzheimer’s disease research, as well as the experience of patients and caregivers on the Alzheimer’s continuum. A focus of her work is medical decision making when the patient is cognitively impaired. Her work is supported by grant awards from the National Institute on Aging. She is a member of the Greenwall Faculty Scholars Program class of 2023 and the 2023 recipient of the Baruch A. Brody Award and Lecture in Bioethics. Her work has been published in leading bioethics and biomedical journals, including the Hastings Center Report, American Journal of Bioethics, New England Journal of Medicine, and JAMA. She is also a co-author of Clinical Research Ethics Consultation: A Casebook (Oxford University Press). 

Reese is a transplant nephrologist, bioethicist, clinical trialist, and an advocate for equitable health care. He is a leader in research on transplantation, in empirical and conceptual work on the applied ethics of transplantation, and in mentoring trainees and junior faculty working on the ethical dimensions of transplantation. In 2011, he received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government to early-stage scientists. More recently, he was elected to the American Society of Clinical Investigation. He is past chair of the Ethics Committee of the United Network for Organ Sharing, the organization that oversees organ allocation policy in the US. His research has often combined ethics and epidemiology to demonstrate that, with a robust informed consent process, many patients can benefit from transplantation using organs that were previously discarded, such as organs from donors with hepatitis C virus infection. Reese’s work has been published in leading medical journals, including The New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, The American Journal of Transplantation, and the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology.

In addition to his position with Penn’s Medical Ethics and Health Policy, Sisti is the director of Penn’s Scattergood Program for the Applied Ethics of Behavioral Health Care and holds secondary appointments in the  departments of Philosophy and Psychiatry, where he directs the ethics curriculum in the residency program. He examines ethical and policy challenges in mental health care, including long-term psychiatric care for individuals with serious mental illness and clinical ethics issues in correctional settings. Sisti’s research also explores ethical issues in psychedelic research and clinical application. His writing has appeared in medical and bioethics journals such as JAMA, JAMA Psychiatry, Psychiatric Services, the Hastings Center Report, and the Journal of Medical Ethics. He is co-editor of three books, including Applied Ethics in Mental Healthcare: An Interdisciplinary Reader (MIT Press).  

The Hastings Center is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization created from multiple disciplines, including philosophy, law, political science, and education. The Hastings Center was critical to establishing the field of bioethics in 1969 and has been evolving ever since. Founded by philosopher Daniel Callahan and psychoanalyst Willard Gaylin, The Hastings Center is the oldest independent, nonpartisan, interdisciplinary research institute of its kind in the world.