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Technical University of Munich

The Technical University of Munich is a public research university in Munich, Germany. It specializes in engineering, technology, medicine, and applied and natural sciences.

A University of Excellence under the German Universities Excellence Initiative, TUM is considered one of the top universities in Germany according to major rankings and is among the leading universities in the European Union.  Its researchers and alumni include 18 Nobel laureates and 23 Leibniz Prize winners.


People

PD Dr. Stuart McLennan

Stuart is the Director of Research at the Institute for History and Ethics of Medicine at the Technical University of Munich. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Philosophy (with a focus on ethics and moral philosophy), a Master's degree in Bioethics and Health Law (with distinction), a PhD in Biomedical Ethics (with Summa Cum Laude), and in December 2020 he received his Habilitation and Venia docendi in Biomedical Ethics from the Medical Faculty of the University of Basel. His research tends to be highly interdisciplinary and practice-oriented, using the empirical bioethics approach that integrates ethical, legal and policy analysis with empirical methods. His general research focus is on ethical and regulatory issues related to learning health systems, in particular data science and AI in healthcare, patient safety and quality improvement, and clinical research. He is also heavily involved in the development of the new interdisciplinary approach of embedded ethics (EE) to integrate ethical considerations into AI development.

Alena is a Professor of Ethics of Medicine and Health Technologies and Director of the Institute for History and Ethics of Medicine at the Technical University of Munich. Since 2020, she has been chair of the German Ethics Council. She is a fully qualified medical doctor with further degrees in philosophy and sociology.  

She works on the whole range of biomedical ethics and theory, from the 'classical' medical ethics issues from clinical practice, to challenges posed by biotechnological innovation and medical research; to ethical and justice issues in modern healthcare systems. She takes an interdisciplinary approach to embedded ethics, where ethical issues are part of the development of medical innovations from the outset. She collaborates with clinical colleagues as well as with lawyers, social scientists, philosophers, health economists or psychologists.

Dr. Amelia Fiske

Amelia is a Senior Research Associate at the Institute for the History and Ethics of Medicine at the Technical University of Munich (TUM). Amelia is a cultural anthropologist and has been working in an interdisciplinary bioethics setting since 2017. Her work is at the intersection of cultural anthropology, feminist science and technology studies, social medicine and bioethics, and environmental and humanities studies. She received her PhD in cultural anthropology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (USA), held a postdoctoral position at Kiel University and conducted extensive field research in Ecaudor before coming to TUM. Amelia has over a decade of experience conducting interdisciplinary qualitative and ethnographic research in two key areas: 1) anthropological and critical social science approaches to bioethics, artificial intelligence, and digital and sociotechnical changes in knowledge production; 2) ethnographic attention to issues of socio-ecological justice, experiences of toxicity in the context of extraction, participatory research methods, and graphic arts.

Dr. Marthe Smedinga

Marthe holds a Bachelor’s degree in Biology from the University of Groningen, a Master’s degree in Neuroscience from the University of Amsterdam, a Master’s degree in Philosophy from the Free University in Amsterdam and a PhD degree from the Radboud University in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. Her research revolves around ethical challenges relating to the practical implementation of new technologies in the biomedical sector, such as large-scale medical data-sharing, bioprediction of incurable diseases and genetic modification. She combines qualitative and quantitative research with ethical analysis to be able to provide practical ethics advice.