Technical University of Munich

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.

Ilaria is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute of History and Ethics in Medicine, Technical University of Munich (TUM). Ilaria has a background in Ethical and Political Philosophy and Philosophy of Science. She did her PhD with the STS Research Unit of the interdisciplinary doctoral program “Foundations of Life Sciences, Bioethics and Cognitive Sciences” at the European School of Molecular Medicine based in Milan, Italy, in partnership with the European Institute of Oncology and with the University of Milan. Her doctoral research, developed within an STS framework, analyzed the emerging medical approach of precision medicine from an ethical and political perspective, by considering the possibly deriving benefits and their distributions in relation to social and health equity. As a postdoc, she joined the ERC project MISFIRES at University College Dublin, on collaborative approaches to healthcare innovation to the pursuit of social justice. She is primarily interested in social and health equity (and the connections between the two), and her research relates to issues of distributive justice and of equity in the context of health and healthcare, in connection with social inequalities and the social determinants of health, and with accessibility and inclusivity of health research and care.

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.