Center News & Announcements

Congratulations to Howard Brody, who has been named University Distinguished Professor. This award, for recognition of faculty achievements in teaching, research, and public service, is among the highest honors that can be bestowed on a faculty member by the university.

Len Fleck chaired and served as a panelist for a session titled “Behavioral Genetics and Public Policy: Do We Need Revisions? Should the Public Have a Role?” at the joint meeting of the American Society of Bioethics and Humanities and the Canadian Bioethics Society in Montreal, Quebec, Canada (Oct. 23-26, 2003).

Judy Andre is spending the year in Toronto, Canada, as a Visiting Scholar at the University of Toronto’s Joint Centre for Bioethics. Many people at the Centre, and in the Public Health Sciences department, are working on issues of global public health, which is part of her research focus for the year.

Linda Hunt and Tom Tomlinson have received an MSU Intramural Research Grant of $34,949 for a project entitled “Family and health professional perceptions of PVS patients.” The goal is to better understand the conceptual, ethical and cultural sources of disagreement about the level of awareness and responsiveness of patients in persistent vegetative state. The project starts in September 2004.

At the 2003 American Anthropological Association meetings in Chicago, Libby Bogdan-Lovis co-organized a double session, “Gift Horse or Trojan Horse?: Evidence-based Practice Transforming Medicine.” As part of that session she presented “Negotiating Power Relationships: Certified Nurse-Midwives Reliance on Evidence-based Practice” (Nov. 2003).

Clayton Thomason presented a paper entitled “Religion and Spirituality in Medical Education” as part of the ASBH/CBS Meeting, Montreal, Quebec, Canada (Oct. 25, 2003).