When Jadesola Crownson graduated with a degree in biochemistry and plans for medical school, she already knew how to think like a scientist. But she wanted to grapple with questions science alone could not answer.
“I think bioethics is kind of that missing niche in my education,” said Crownson, who earned her B.S. from the University of San Francisco. “I have all these issues, and I don’t really know where to talk about them. Who to talk about them with.”
This summer, Crownson found those conversations. She joined 49 other students who came to Yale from around the country and the world to explore ethical questions surrounding health care, technology, public policy, and scientific innovation.
Now in its 18th year, the Yale Interdisciplinary Bioethics Center’s Sherwin B. Nuland Summer Institute in Bioethics convenes students and professionals from fields including medicine, law, philosophy, public health, and religious studies to confront questions regarding end-of-life care, clinical decision-making, artificial intelligence, genomics, climate change, animals, social justice, and more.
The center, supported by the Institution for Social and Policy Studies, encourages scholars to engage with real-world dilemmas through seminars, lectures, research projects, site visits, and conversation with experts from a wide range of fields.
“The Bioethics Center and this summer program represent one of the great jewels of interdisciplinary education at Yale,” said Alan Gerber, ISPS director and Sterling Professor of Political Science. “The goal is not simply to learn ethical theories, but to apply them to contemporary problems in medicine, technology, law, policy, and public life.”
Over the course of the program, each student develops a research question, conducts a literature review, prepares an annotated bibliography, and creates an academic poster that is presented to faculty and peers at Yale School of Medicine. The project gives students practical experience in bioethics research while encouraging them to contribute their own perspectives to ongoing debates.